Not me, for one.  I think that you will find that the subjects which you quote as non-engineering are posted in the “Tea room” section.  A perfectly acceptable place to raise such questions in my opinion.  No “talking shop” in those sorts of places, I would imagine – I have never worked in such an environment.

Oh and by the way, as far as I know, the magazine was not called Model Engineering Workshop (or Worksop) it was always “Engineers’ “.

John

Paul,

Paul, I don’t fundamentally disagree with you.  Just looked and out of the 25 latest replies, 6 were under the tea room heading so just shy of 25% of latest responses are under that theme.  Tea room posts on here often concentrate on stuff that I would expect to find on Facebook from my limited experience of that medium and the reason I don’t engage with it.  90% of posts on TT are restricted to road steam / events and I don’t find that mind numbingly dull, it’s the subject matter I expect to find there and why I visit..  I like to see what people are doing and how they are doing it, hoping to learn from their experience, learn about the history of the stuff they are working on, how manufacturers approached various issues etc.  I visit TT every day, seldom look here.  Maybe Tea Room should feature in the title?

Can’t speak for the book, haven’t bought it for years.

Paul.

I have some sympathy, Paul, the answer of course is to try and steer content back on track with comment or material, even if it’s a quick photo & couple of lines in ‘What Did You Do Today’..

As I said in the Kelsey thread and I’ve said elsewhere anyone wanting a forum on making models which is the heart of “Model Engineering” is not that well served by this one.

Of 25 latest posts Dean’s 24cc engine is the only one about making a model and there is little other comment in that apart from his own posts, something I find with my builds too where they seem to create less interest than the latest windows rant of spam email.

On the other hand somewhere like MEM is far more foucused. 80% of new posts overnight were in build threads,10% a new member and 10% someone showing a new bit of tooling. You will find similar figures on HMEM too. They both have tea room type sections but they get used far less as the members seem to actually be doing what their forum names suggest M. ENGINE MAKER and H. MODEL ENGINE MACHINIST

When the powers above use forum activity figures to try and get ads and upgrades in software they don’t care about what the post are about just the numbers so quantity wins over quality.