I’d like to get back to the quite serious subject of this topic. Every few days or weeks (like most members nowadays I think) I check to see what is going on on this site and it is most annoying to see the “recent posts” column filled up with unnecessary “welcome posts”, and these push (for some) interesting posts far too soon off the front page, and most will go by unnoticed.
I was wandering what was causing all these new member accounts, automated spam machines of some sort or real people that check in and leave forever directly afterwards.
I did some trials by putting search words in Google in browsers Firefox and Microsoft Edge, I chose words that would definitely result in a few fordpinto.com site hits, both for text and images, and there are plenty.
I would urge other members to check this for themselves, maybe your results will be different.
The very serious problem that I encountered, is that in most cases clicking the links to the fordpinto.com site doesn’t land you anywhere near the post or image that you want to see.
You are most likely to either land on the home page, from which there is no way a guest could find the post he or she clicked on in the browser search results.
Or you hit one of an assortment of screens that tell you that a topic or board is missing, or is off limits, or telling you to login or register an account.
I guess that some people are even so eager to get to the information they are seeking that they will register an account, and then are disappointed and leave because this gets them no closer to the image or topic they clicked on in the Google search results.
If the number of genuine new members is an indicator of the amount of people that really seek information on this site, and then hit a brick wall, than that deeply saddens me.
There is tons of valuable knowledge on this site, and the next generation can’t get at it.
This means that this site is not slowly fading away because of the average age of the core members, or F***book competition, but because of site access problems.