If you visited this forum a week ago, you would have seen that it stated there were 24000 + (twenty four thousand plus) members here.   Yet now it tells me that there are just over 1000.  What has happened?

Our sign up process has been overrun by what's known as "Forum Spam".  That's people who ask for an account to advertise their products and services which are nothing to do with the TransWilts line - or indeed to do with anything else railway, public, transport, or south west UK.  Rather, they may wanting to advertise pharaceutical products, sex sites, or post links to their own pages which cover any of a million other topics, in order to help them with their marketing.   We cannot allow such postings to be made - and certainly not in any quality that would drown out our whole purpose.

The remaining accounts, at clearance, are those of people who have been authorised and have come back and logged it.  That's not necessarily posters, and some of them are still forum spanners from longer ago, but we are getting there and cleaning up. You'll see the number of members fluctuating as we continue to work on this. In contrast to the numbers shown here, the numbers on our sister forum the First Great Western Coffee Shop - currently 852 - are approved accounts, and do not include spammers that we're not yet cleared from the system - the Coffee Shop is running on a later software release, which presents a much more meaningful statistic to you.

We (the administrators of this site) are currently planning an upgrade - perhaps to this new version used on the Coffee Shop, or perhaps moving forward even beyond the Coffee shop.