On this day, ten years ago, this forum starts work. First it was one experimental forum and very soon it was drop and work continued on this one. Idea of establishing forum is basic idea of sharing idea, cooperation, assistance and friendship of the people with similar interest. I also follow basic rules of the reliability- in that time I have published several references works, have been skilled modeler and even work masters for casting kits and have proven my skill on one model competition. Add to this is fact is that I work on technical drawings and have good archive material and all of this give me legitimacy value of personal capabilities to built and lead forum.
Forum was open and everyone was able to join without any problems and all content was visible. In that time I was also arranged archive material for free download. As well I am from Serbia, I decided to put bilingual names and headlines of the boards. No matter of my best faith and intentions, problems start soon, from Serbian’s, who else. They established practice to visit all possible forums and influence people not to visit our forum. Additional action was is contacting forum admin, to personally enlighten him in most possible way about us. Result was visible very soon, atmosphere on forum was very negative, any attempt to do anything was follow by sarcasm and also, I was under strong pressure on foreigner forums. In that time I was member of foreigner forums only. Violation of our property was very normal thing and agitation to members to left our forum was very strong. This force me in July 2007 to close forum for membership and number of almost 500 members I have cut down to under 100. Other features of forum was keep on, like download section. Some new members are joined but principal problems continued.
Plague which some members (ex members, thanks God) bring here is selective activity. They look only their own topic or topic of their friends, they totally ignored other members as well their work. But they was very active in downloading all what we share for members and was very laud to demand their rights to material which we could get from model manufacturers. No matter of that, we have more stable work conditions here and one of our best project was publishing of our digital magazine. With over hundred of pages and released monthly, that was greatly accepted by many members on forum. It was released in two way, as e reading publication on special dedicated web site and just for us, pdf printable file. But… Serbians strike again- on one forum somebody very smart, place all our magazines for download without asking us and no care that it is prepared for us only. This resulted that I decided to close publication and completely clean forum from unwanted members. We did not continue work on magazine but also, similar magazine was not started by any other, as you see some people know only to destruct but not to make and share benefit. After that, we have golden age on forum work. I guess deleted members are happy with those who instruct ‘em how to ruin our place and they have the same benefits on their forums as they had here.
In this second age of the forum, it become what I have imagine from very start, small working place with family atmosphere. My great pleasure is to note that many of our members are authors of printed publication articles and books and also very experienced modelers and some of them even master modeler. All features are still active and I am happy that forum still manage to provide a lot of valuable materials. Must say that we are probably only forum where forum share for free materials with others and I am sure that we have excellent flow of materials here. We stay also in support to some publishers and manufacturers with our rich base of archive materials. Many of us become close friends in private and we even manage to meet each other from time to time.
I am happy with this place, happy to know you and wish you all many successful years to come.
