You'd be talking basically to yourself if the forum was closed to non-members. Unfortunately as there is no automatic marrying up of actual membership status and the one shown under the username it's not overly scientific, but look at those who post and their membership status and see how many are non-members.
Now look at how many people have recently cruised up and started to contribute over the past few weeks/months. I'd bet pretty close to none of them joined the Club before they used the forum, though some of them might have done now.
Despite what it says under my name I'm not a member, and I doubt I ever will be as last time I looked there was no option to join without the magazine. I was a member for 12 years in total and I recycled about 50 unopened magazines when I moved out of my house, so there is no way I'd pay an overseas rate to have it shipped to me. If there was an internet only membership option I might join to give something to the Club, but I absolutely wouldn't if I had to to use the forum as it wouldn't be worth using and I'd therefore get nothing at all from the Club.
The fact is that if this forum weren't free to use by non-members that wouldn't encourage people to join the Club, and the Club would lose those members who join the forum first and then the Club after. In fact they'd lose existing members who use the forum and disagree with the decision.
The reason I say that is that there are any number of free forums on the 'net. If this place went members only tomorrow I'd carry on posting on TIPEC only, as would every other non-member I imagine, and hence you would as well if you wanted to talk to anyone. Forua need a critical mass of users to be worthwhile, and it was actually touch and go if we even had enough users here at all for quite a time. In the unlikely event TIPEC followed suit and made their forum members only as well then we'd have to move to Pistonheads or maybe Stuart would welcome us en-masse at 968UK or someone else would start a new, free, UK Porsche forum. Whatever the solution there would be one, and that's where people would post and the ones trying for enforce some payment would die.
You might still not be convinced PCGB should be putting it on for free, so one last thing. As the UK's official Porsche club (and the world's second largest I think), it wouldn't be a good look for PCGB to run a forum that is little used when there are very active UK Porsche alternatives making it look bad, and equally if it were closed down that would look just a little bit backward in 2009, don't you think?
I expect this subject will keep coming up. I actually thought a few years ago that the decision was going to go in favour of closing it to non-members, but thankfully after the discussion raging on for some time someone convinced the board of sense. I'd like to think the current board are a bit more open-minded than recent ones have been.
Lastly, if anyone wants to change my status to non-member or ex-member then please do.
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