I gotta thank this site just for being here, and for being so receptive to new subjects and ideas.
Also I gotta thank the many people from a-tsx.com who have been coming by to visit and to post.
A little digression, but I think related.....
A while back, during a previous mini-crisis over there, I expressed a concern to their mods and admins that some aspects of the site's handling would endanger its long-term success -- that a crass-and-crude style might be OK for a while but that in the long run, an Acura site needed to cater to more-elegant and more-established types and that the current approach wasn't going to do it. One of the the thoughts I offered was that females would tend to be more affected, and that one of the first signs might be that the site would lose most of the female members. For whatever it may be worth, this seems indeed to have been occurring. The proportion of female participation over there seems to have drastically decreased in the past 3-4 months.
Not that I'm sure what this means, or that it's related to what I said. But I believe that it is, and that it's a "leading indicator." I believe a site that is run in such an inelegant manner will be handicapped in attracting and retaining the kinds of people that it needs. I don't mean that the site will fail, but I do believe it will be impeded, and it appears that to some extent it already has been. Because of their considerable degree of activity, nothing like this may be evident for some time, and perhaps they will be successful enough for their tastes anyway. But they will not have as wide an appeal as they might.
This site is not nearly as active as that one right now, but its tone may well be more comfortable for many people, and in the long run we may see the favorable results of that. Including, by the way, more participation by women. I notice that few if any females appear to have been active on this site of late, but perhaps that will change. In any event, it appears that the decrease in female participation "over there" has been drastic.
(Pardon the tangent.)