MR's New Format

[Marc_Magnus]

I think yhe changes arte good, but some features maybe would be welcome and some again.
-There is not as lot as the past trackside photos.
-The "month model award" had completely dissapper
-Never any comments about some of new brass model on the market
-May be too much articles about basic modeling and no more great project like the
Jerome and south western or the San Juan central or the Clinchfield featured years
ago.

If basic is necessary I am sure that a lot of readers will appreciate more complicated projects.
Some European publication have mad the mistake to be too basic and lost alot of readers, some have made the change and are more attreactive for many readers, because they touch the basic and bigger project.

Marc, Belgium

[wjstix]

I'd love to see the old "Bull Session" come back, but that pretty much ended in that style when Al Kalmbach died, he wrote those I beleive. (He often used the pen name "Boomer Pete".) Course if it wasn't for dating myself, I would have been a pretty lonely teen back then. ; )

Ironically my first thought when I got the new MR was "OK, now I can check to see what flea markets and stuff are coming up!!". For the limited space they take up, I'd rather see them keep the listings in the mag.

BTW I really dislike the way MR set up their product listings in the front a few issues back. I would rather see them listed like before, by manufacturer. I know I don't need to read about a new product from say Overland Brass - I can't afford it whatever it is !! Plus in the current issue there are I think 8 listings for HO freight cars, three of which are under the heading "various freight" or something like that. That's a little vague. (BTW one heading is "three boxcars" which are really one box and two reefers...from MDC.)

[potlatcher]

QUOTE: Originally posted by jfugate

I agree that ditching the coming events seems to be somewhat of a boo-boo on MR's part. For all the hoop-ta-lah around promoting the hobby (with things like the World's Greatest Hobby [WGH] intiative), this move seems to be a very anti WGH one.

Basically, moving to "online only" immediately cuts your audience in half, and biases it heavily toward the young.

I don't think MR should move the coming events listings online either, but perhaps they can justify it using your latter point. A lot of folks are trying to find ways to interest the younger generation in model railroading. If the primary rationale for listing upcoming shows and meets is to promote the hobby, maybe moving it to a medium that is biased toward the young isn't such a bad thing.

As to content in this issue, what was that "Branch Line in a Tunnel" article all about? I read it three times and still couldn't figure out what the author was trying to explain. Perhaps a better diagram showing the movement of trains on the track schematic might have helped, but I'm not so sure.

Tom

[Bob Hayes]

wjstix,
I have to agree with you. There are several manufacturers whose products I won't buy, one of them is anti-Boy Scout. It has gotten so now I have to read the new product listings backwards; look at the manufacturer first, see if it's one I'll buy, and then see what they are making.
Bob Hayes

[Anonymous]

I use to find it very convenient to grab the latest issue and see if there were any shows nearby during the upcoming weekend or if I was traveling somewhere in that vicinity. All I did was scan down looking for the state code and then check details. Took me all of a minute or two.The search process for the online listing is not very user friendly and takes too much time plus just the general time it takes to get on line(sorry, DSL connections aren't for me). As for the suggestion that people who don't have computers go to their local library mine is a 25 minute drive each way. 50 minutes really wouldn't be worth it to me if I had to go there. If you want people who don't have copmputers to go to libraries or internet cafes or similar places for the show listings then its just as easy for them, or actually any of us with a computer, not to buy the magazine but read it online isn't it?

[jfugate]

If MR is going to move half their audience to online only from some things, they need to do something about their current web site. It's almost unusable for dial up, it's so slow.

Just over half of all internet users are still dial up, so MR needs to seriously test the usability of their site over dial up if they are moving things to internet only.

As it stands, their site is somewhat suggish even on broadband, and painfully slow for most dial up users. MR appears to be using ASP3.0 technology and probably IIS 5, both of which are now over 3 years old. The next generation ASP.NET and IIS 6 use a superior memory model and are noticeably faster. 18 months is considered a generation these days on the internet, and if you're not upgading your technology every couple of years to keep up, you'll rapidly fall behind. As it stands MR's "under the hood" technology for their site is about ready for the rest home.

The point is, if you're going to increasingly rely on the internet as a communication vehicle to your customers, you need to invest in making your web site really hum or you're going to irritate your customer base because of slow performance. Statistics gathered indicate if your web site takes more than about 40 seconds to respond, they'll leave and never come back, and many people will begin jumping ship if they haven't gotten a response back in about 10 seconds.

MR's web site fails on to meet these performance results at times even on broadband, and their video playback "feature" is often abysmally slow. I know of several modelers who regularly use the internet who've given up on MR's web site because it's so slow on dial up.