Total post count and join date?


I joined before Bob inherited the forum from his granddad. He squandered quite a bit of it before he got serious, but here we all are now.
 
Went on a search to find out how to display by join date, oldest first, and no luck there ...
I can see individual ones, but not a list ?

No, there's no oldest member list etc.

This place has been around since 2004, in one form or another. Railroadforums is even older, back to about 1998. We've been through a lot of different hosting companies and have been through 5 major released of Vbulletin and we're now on the 2nd major build of Xenforo. Each new version is like going from Windows 8 to Windows 10.

Lots of people have come and gone over the years. New members join, old ones leave, it slowly changes over time. Some have been here many years, other just signed up recently. It really doesn't matter.

The forum software does have some "trophy" points and the like, but they only showed up when we switched to Vbulletin, so they aren't accurate.

In any case, we don't want to encourage folks to post just to increase their post counts. I don't need 50 new messages saying "That's cool!" and "Nice photo!" from some member trying to up their post count.

So, it's not something we track and really not something that means much of anything.
 
You want to know the most impressive thing on the forum? It's right here.

Building the Pinnacle Creek Mining & Timber Co. RR

245 pages, over 8 years of posts, and a view count of over 1 million.

That's pretty impressive, I've not seen anything else that even comes close.
 
I'm actually more concerned about location over join date and post count, it's better to know whose close by that keeps up on local events and other benefits of the hobby.
True that is an interesting point.....

We don't track location at all. So there's nothing to show who's located where.

I can, if needed, track the general location (city and state) of a member's IP address. Even that is only very general, often an ISP will show their location as being in the large city they're headquarters are in. Looking at my own IP, it's routinely 50 or more miles off.

We only use that info for one thing, and that's to track and ban spammers and/or fake accounts.

Even then, there are many tools out there that allow you to create a fake IP location. So it can be hidden if they want. We have ways of detecting that too, so it's a constant back and forth.
 
I joined before Bob inherited the forum from his granddad. He squandered quite a bit of it before he got serious, but here we all are now.

I am a granddad, LOL, and I've been running railroad websites since before the turn of the century!

That's right sonny, Sonny used to use 56K modems, uphill, both ways, in the snow.

My original website, online since 1996. https://railroaddata.com/
 
That's right sonny, Sonny used to use 56K modems, uphill, both ways, in the snow.
And that makes you an newbie spoiled brat! :cool: I started with 300 baud terminals with acoustic couplers. Moved up to an Atari. Then started the SnarfQuest Bulletin Board when I got a PC with a HARD drive! and a new fancy 1200baud modem. QBBS written in turbo pascal, and umm BinkleyTerm to answer the phone on the FidoNet. Had 4 phone lines into the house in those days.
 
And that makes you an newbie spoiled brat! :cool: I started with 300 baud terminals with acoustic couplers. Moved up to an Atari. Then started the SnarfQuest Bulletin Board when I got a PC with a HARD drive! and a new fancy 1200baud modem. QBBS written in turbo pascal, and umm BinkleyTerm to answer the phone on the FidoNet. Had 4 phone lines into the house in those days.

Now, now, not so fast... The first computer I worked with took punchcards and was programmed in Fortran. The first personal computer I had was a Commodore 64, and, like you, I had a 300 baud acoustic modem. I also used to have one that light up a little "HS" (High speed) when it connected at 28.8, LOL. After 300, we thought that was screaming fast.

I also ran various BBS's and forums. Anyone recall Compuserve? I was staff on their railroad forum. What about GEnie? Remember it? You might have dialed up with your 300 baud modem, but only during off hours. From 8 to 5 they Charged by the hour! At a whopping $6 per hour. That's still expensive now, but back then it was far more so. I was a sysop there, running the Railroad Forum, Model Railroads and I think a couple others. It was all text based back then, at least at first. Eventually they had some primitive graphics. I also ran an Amiga board for a while.

What I actually meant when I said "I've been online since 1996" is that 1996 is when I purchased my first domain name, and created my first website accessible from the world wide web. I've been online so long that my NIC Handle is my 3 initials and 2 numbers. That's how new the whole system was back then.

Just for fun, a now vs then comparison:


Time to download a 1 mb file:
300 baud modem300 bps27,962 sec (7.7 hrs)
1200 baud modem1200 bps6,990 sec (1.9 hrs)
2400 baud modem2400 bps3,495 sec (1 hr)
9600 baud modem9600 bps873 sec
14.4K modem14.4 Kbps568.9 sec
28.8K modem28.8 Kbps284.4 sec
56K modem56.6 Kbps144.7 sec
IDSL128 Kbps64.0 sec
Cable Modem512 Kbps16.0 sec
 
I just saw your join date 4/4/05 !! That's about 15 years ago. Why ask this, 15 years later ?! 🤪
 
Wasn't that done on a Commodore 64 or was it a VIC 20?

You're not as far off as you might think. I was using an Amiga back then, several of them in fact. First the Amiga 500, then eventually I had two Amiga 3000's. They were amazingly powerful graphics machines for their time.

My first site was pretty basic. I guess it was a blog, long before blogs were invented. The biggest feature was my links directory. All html was written by hand in those days, even Front Page wasn't around yet. I had a list of railroad sites on the web, every page I could find. It was like 50 maybe? Now I have nearly 5,000 and we're far more selective on what's included.
 
joined in march 2018 had 51 posts but now it went down to 48. do post counts get erased after a certain amount of time ?
 
I joined over a decade ago, then lost track of my account. I think I started a new account then was able to recover this one.
 
joined in march 2018 had 51 posts but now it went down to 48. do post counts get erased after a certain amount of time ?


Posts do get erased but time isn't the factor. We delete posts when images are broken. Typically that happens when they're hosted externally.

Ask any forum operator, PhotoBucket is our worst nightmare. Broken images, huge watermarks, massive disruption. Years later, I'm still cleaning up after them.

Also, it may not even have been your post. Could be a reply to a thread that says "Check out my cool train! (missing image) (missing image) etc" Since, at that point, it no longer makes any sense, we'll remove the entire thread.
 
Now, now, not so fast... The first computer I worked with took punchcards and was programmed in Fortran.
Wow and Cool sounds familiar. My college still had a plugboard IBM 908? Didn't have to use it though because freshman year we had a punched tape on a Burrows 1500, and then cards with good old FORTRAN II on an IBM 1130. We actually had a plotter. Thought it was the coolest piece of equipment in the world. By the time I was a senior Boeing donated an IBM 360-44 that had floating point instructions! It was mainly for the aeronautical engineering program. It had FORTRAN IV and COBOL, and PL/I subset and SNOBOL. but in all that I ended up being mainly an assembly language programmer.
 
We delete posts when images are broken. Typically that happens when they're hosted externally.
If you find one of mine (or any of my prior handles) please don't delete it, let me know and I'll fix it. Those are usually posted from my website. When it went to a new provider they suddenly became case sensitive. Easy enough for me to fix if I know about it.
 
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