How can we put life back into the Survival UK sites?

[Devonian]

I'm with LS on this, if you allow free unrestricted access, people will simply take what they want whenever they want and have no incentive to contribute.

I've said it before that I think large parts of the forums should only be visible to members, that should encourage 'genuine' people to sign up and then to sign in when they want to view new posts, that immediately gives them a sense of membership and in turn they are more likely to participate in discussions.

Furthermore with the Download sites I would suggest, that only forum members are allowed access to the downloads and additionally that they should have a minimum of say 10 or 20 posts before they can access/download any of the files. I know you probably won't like this, but if you want to increase participation, this may have to a compromise that you have to make.

The only other suggestion I would make is perhaps to have an 'off-topic' forum where anything and everything non-prepping can be discussed, including general banter, again the purpose of this would simply be to develop more of a community among the forum members, as at the end of the day, we all need to relax and we all have other concerns, issues and responsibilities that are non-prepping related......