OTOL 9th Anniversary Options

[KevinKorell]

It was July 1, 2003 that marked the official start of On Track On Line, our continuation after the demise of Prodigy (where this group had its start). Dave, HaRRy, Alan, and I worked feverishly in the week before that to have everything up and available to avoid interruption in service once Prodigy officially turned out the lights at the end of that June. On Track On Line has become an integrated family of services including this board, our static website, and the Sunday Chat sessions. We also have in person meets at least twice a year known as Fests, where we ride the rails together. Our summer Fests, the larger ones, take place in July roughly 2 weeks after our anniversaries, giving us a means of celebration. It was in mid-July of 2003 that some of the principals here as well as a handful of our prolific members at the time toasted the kickoff of OTOL in a bar in Chicago during our Windy City RailFest.

Although the faces have changed slightly over the years, we still have many regulars who were here from the start, even dating back to our Prodigy days. We thank everyone for contributing to our success, whether they are from the old days or have joined us relatively recently. I also want to personally thank everyone for a minimum of problems that we've had to deal with. We get the occasional person who breaks copyright rules, or joins with the intention of spamming us, but for the most part running this board has been almost trouble free.

To that end, I just want to offer a few friendly reminders.

Please watch the length of your topic titles. Recently we have had quite a few posts that end mid-sentence, often even mid-word. Obviously these were copied & pasted from somewhere, which is fine -- except that there is a finite number of characters allowed in the topic title. What that number is seems to vary depending on the characters used. But please check back by refreshing your screen after a post to ensure that the topic title doesn't end like that. Remember you have 2 lines available, so the last prepositional phrase could go on the 2nd line. Taking a few extra seconds to edit the title to get the throught across with fewer words will make everything more user friendly.

By the same token, the topic title should not be too short either. Think of it as requiring a noun and verb just like any sentence, in order to convey the best thought about what the topic is about. Posting just the name of a city or the name of a transit provider doesn't tell me what the item is about.

One of the original requests from our co-founder HaRRy when he was a frequent poster was to avoid "over-posting". This remains one of my pet peeves as well, and I've often had to go and fix this when it occurs. Specificially, this is the nesting of previous posts in a response. When you post a response to a thread, you are answering only one person's previous thought. Thus you need not repeat what they already repeated in their post. For example:

What not to do:

Your response to the first response

The response to the original post

The original post

What to do:

Your response to the first response

The response to the original post

Otherwise the nesting of the thread gets so complicated that it's difficult to follow. Repeating anything 2 or more posts before is highly redundant and wastes space. It does not take too much thought to edit the post to remove any old thoughts.

As always, remember copyright laws. Don't post more than a sentence or two, perhaps the first paragraph of a long story, and give credit to the source you got the item from. Let my many posts be the example. Don't post an entire article verbatim unless it's a press release and you indicate such. Photos should never be taken from another source; they should be your own and we prefer they be kept to a minimum.

Nobody is perfect; we all make mistakes. Every once in a while a mistake I make (such as forgetting to post the link to a story) is pointed out to me. But I have a good excuse in that I'm spending my time correcting others' mistakes as well. Please look back over your post, perhaps even proofreading and spell checking it. Poorly spelled words that folks can't understand are frustrating to the reader.

If you do come across anything on our board that doesn't belong here, such as a commercial for something, or anything that is in bad taste, please get in contact with Alan or me immediately. We have a reporting feature on this board, but since most of you have our phone/text numbers, it would be faster to contact us that way just in case we are not on the board at that time.

Finally, I intend to live a long time and be here running this board for a long time as well. Nevertheless, the past 2 months has been rough for me as I go through some "preventive maintenance" of my own and dealt with a death in the family. I haven't been online as much as I had been in the past. So it becomes ever more prudent that each contributor to this board continues to help out and continue making this the user friendly place it has been for the past 9 years.

Thanks again for all your help, and see you in a few weeks as we celebrate yet another year by riding the rails in Albuquerque and Chicago.

[Sloan]

Happy birthday, OTOL!

Best wishes for continued success..........and,of course, many thanks to Kevin, David, and HaRRy for making it possible for we pro-rail folks to stay current on rail & transit happenings.


Sloan

[KevinKorell]

Of course also many thanks to those frequent posters who help me out getting the rail news items out there for everyone to enjoy.