Hello World
This may be an unnecessary post as the horse has possibly bolted long ago, but after having just logged onto the Filmwasters mailbox for the first time in a couple of years and seen the not insignificant number of emails from people following up on their unactioned requests to join the forum and realising that those emails had also been completely ignored, I thought that it might be worth posting something here on the topic of new signups.
When we started FW back in 2005 there were 5 very diligent and energetic admins. The FW community was super active and incredibly creative with guest galleries, regular collaborations, audio and video podcasts, postcard/print exchanges and a ton of chat on the various forum boards. It was fun. As admins we were totally 'on it' and things ticked along very nicely for the first 10 years or so. Then, life happened in all its glory and the 5 of us - and a lot of the early members - drifted away from Filmwasters. I blame having children for some of it and Facebook for the rest!
Ommmm. We stopped generating content and directing activities and would have shut the whole thing down if it hadn't been for a couple of factors:
1. There was a lot of really cool information on the site (particularly on the boards) and we could see from the stats that some of the FW posts were being returned in Google searches from people looking for info on old cameras, processes, films etc. etc.
2. There were a handful of awesome regulars who seemed to still have a place for this forum in their lives and used it daily.
...so we let most of the site die away slowly, but kept the forum going. At this point I need to pause and give
a H.U.G.E. shout out here to Satish for stepping in a few years ago and volunteering to help me with the tech stuff which I had no time or inclination to do anymore, but which is 100% necessary to keep the forum online. Without his intervention we would have gone dark years ago and never come back.
One of the most annoying aspects of running an online forum is dealing with all of the spammers who try to join and post nonsense. After having an open registration policy in the very early days we started getting enough of these spam registrations that we had to change our policy and go for a new approach where we'd vet all new applications. The problem with
that system is that we would get
thousands of new applications every month - of which 2 or 3 would be real people. Even with some clever forum software helping us prevent spammers from getting through, it was still a fairly laborious process, but we kind of managed it for the most part. For context, as I type this we have 16,138 join requests waiting to be processed
However, once we stopped actively running Filmwasters and left the forum ticking over for the regulars to use we pretty much stopped processing any new requests. In hindsight we should have posted something like this message years ago to prevent annoying people because I'm sure that's exactly what we've done! Also, it's worth stating that we have nothing against new members, in fact they are most welcome...we just don't have an easy way of letting you in.
So, I'm going to go and reply to all of the "why won't you let me join the forum?" emails from the last 10 years now and see if anyone still wants to come and join in. In the meantime, if you're reading this and you want to join, please apply via the automated method and then immediately follow-up with an email to
filmwasters [at] gmail.com and either myself or Satish should see the email within a week or so and approve your request.
