Nice to see the Telegraph mention PPRuNe. As for the discussion, this rears its head every few months and we all have to go through the motions of reiterating how much more pleasant it is when we all act in a civilised manner.
Experience shows that most regular readers are able to filter out the more extreme postings and have the intelligence to avoid being baited by the regular wind-up merchants. Unfortunately there are always a few who cannot resist entering the fray and diverting a topic off course with counter slagging which, as most of us know just leads nowhere and eventually gets a thread closed or moved to a more obscure part of the forums.
To update you on the stats, we now have over 31,000 registered users. Over 35,000 people visit this website every day from all over the world. Over 10 million pages are viewed every month of which over 6 million have readable content. For the techies, the new server is using just under 140Gb of bandwidth every month and the trend shows a steady increase.
When the site first started I found that on average only 5% of registered users ever posted anything and if that figure is still true then only about 1550 of you ever post here whilst the rest only read. Last month there were 1,078,753 visitors to the site worldwide and this month that figure is up by over 6%.
Some anecdotal evidence of how influential PPRuNe has become was related to me recently by a senior management person who told me that several of their junior managers were rating their performance by what type of coments were being made about them and their service on PPRuNe! Also, earlier this year Robin Lloyd (PPRuNe Towers) and myself were invited to talk at the Flight International Crew management Conference held this year in London. Almost all of the delegates knew of the website and most were aware of what is discussed on it. PPRuNe was also referred to in several of the presentations.
Knowing that PPRuNe has some sort of influence means that the work of the moderators is even more important than ever and whilst we try to avoid intervention, it still becomes necessary when a few individuals don't have the common courtesy to realise that it is possible to have frank and lively discussion without resorting to immature insults and xenophobic rhetoric.
Overall, the success of the website is the diversity of views and experience of the contributors. It will never be perfect and there will always be newcomers who step into the fray without realising how painful that can be especially if they are of a more sensitive personality and there will also be 'regulars' who don't realise that they are extremely irritating to the majority, but then that's just a reflection of society in general.
This is still the most widely read professional aviation website and as long as the majority of readers are able to sort out the wheat from the chaff it will continue to inform and entertain. There are no professional staff writers here but thankfully some of you should have missed your vocation and manage to keep most of the threads exciting and witty. Thank you.
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Capt PPRuNe
aka Danny Fyne
The Professional Pilots RUmour NEtwork