Site Gains 10,000th Member

Late at night on 2 Dec 07, The Truckers Report recorded it's 10,000th member joining up. It''s a big milestone that occurred in a relatively short period of time, and I would like to thank all of you members for participating and helping us grow to this point. We are glad to have you all as members and sincerely hope that the information you have gotten here has been of use to you.

At this point I went back into the files and reviewed the names of past members who have for one reason or another, been banned from the site and why they have been asked to depart. Currently there are 508 members out of the 10k who have been banned, or just a fraction over 5% of the membership. But reviewing this info, I find that almost 80% of these banned fall into 3 categories. They were direct spammers, offering to sell all of you cell phones, interet porn, viagra or some similar pills, or some reason along those lines. Or, they included links in their signatures that directed you to a web site of some kind, where they could make their pitch to get you to purchase their products. And there were some folks along the way that came up with names that caused them to be banished from the site, either through the pornographic and descriptive nature of the name, or the name being intentionally chosen to cause problems. For example, we have had several people log in under names only one letter different from that of some of the staff members, or under name like "Administrator" and that simply isn't an acceptable user name to have. The majority of these people only made one post anyhow, or made several posts in various categories, all saying the same thing and they were banned because they violated the rules and clearly they added nothing to the site.

So, we are left with roughly 1% of the membership who were asked to leave for other reasons, such as their inability to get along with others, bad behaviors, or other problems that tended to indicate that they were unable to function as part of the group. The reason they were banned is as varied as the people themselves, and in almost all cases, there were multiple efforts made to give them a chance to get along and follow the rules, but they chose not to. We get no thrill from banning, but sometimes it has to be done for the betterment of everyone else.

So, since the number of bad apples has turned out to right at the 1% mark, I think you are all entitled to a well deserved pat on the back. Any town that could claim that 99% of it's citizens were productive members of society would be a very fine place to live and raise a family, and this community is no different.

I thank you all for your good behavior, you make being a staff member a much easier job than it could be otherwise.