Is this group being deliberately....

[alga]

Originally Posted by Ianr

Diminished?

I have spoken now to several Haynes builders who have not been able to register on this forum despite protracted efforts to join. It makes me wonder if efforts are being made to deliberately minimise access to this forum.
What does the team think?

That's an interesting question. My arguments for and against conscious suppression on the part of Haynes:

* the initial signup restrictions came into place when the forum was attacked by spammers. The software that runs this forum is proprietary and an ancient version. The administrators looked into upgrading it, but it turned out to be unfeasible or impractical. So, now the administrator has to manually approve all new users, and if there are spam registration attempts, the legitimate subscribers are drowned out in the noise. So that might be the reason -- the legitimate lack of resources on part of admins to approve new signups.

There was a team of moderators who could probably take on such a task, but all of them burned out or lost interest for one reason or another and are not active on the forum any more.

* Several months ago Haynes announced their intention to close down the forum, but after the petition by several dozens of active users relented. Maybe choking the arrival of new users is a tactic to let the forum quietly die?