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EuroGA is four years old

Well done-Great site.
As per my recent post, I would like to see a members editable Airfield directory with comments on fees, catering and fuel prices.

Propman
Nuthampstead , United Kingdom

@LeSving

Then to more serious matters My impression is that EuroGA includes maybe 1-2% of the GA “activity”, and is in no way representative of the average pilot in Europe. EuroGA is very much a small club of gentlemen (more or less) and has an “upper class” feel to it (nothing wrong with that, but it’s nothing good either, it is not very exciting or informative in the long run).

That is quite a specific assertion, which is why I asked you if you could be more specific.

Remember you were for ages asking for a homebuilt section, so we provided that, and a lot of previous “non certified” material was moved into it.

Where is this 98-99% of other GA that you refer to, and do you have any ideas on how to attract it?

When you say EuroGA is not informative, what kind of information would you like to see, and who could provide it?

If I sent you some EuroGA leaflets, would you leave them at your airport (ENVA?)?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Thank you for a fantastic informative and friendly site for real life piloting and ownership in Europe. Congratulations!

EDTD (ESGJ), Germany

Thanks Peter (I’m afraid I don’t know who David is, but thanks to him too are in order I believe)

I like this site because it’s sensible and grown up and authoritative. Far too few places on the internet are like that. (I left the Flyer board altogether because too many posts were either juvenile or bullying or both! )

I have learned a lot here. What a great resource.

Howard

Flying a TB20 out of EGTR
Elstree (EGTR), United Kingdom

David’s company dsc.net does high-end web hosting and other stuff and very kindly hosts EuroGA free of charge. He and his team wrote all the code for this totally custom forum. David is a PPL/IR pilot. He has done a huge amount of work and continues to do so, behind the scenes.

Most other forums use off the shelf “bulletin board” apps e.g. PHP-BB or Vbulletin and they are continually getting hacked. Every aviation forum I know has been hacked and usually infected with trojans, in most cases multiple times. Most are also not mobile-friendly and mobile devices form the majority of today’s users. EuroGA is very unusual in being both mobile-friendly and desktop-friendly.

It is indeed fairly difficult to find a good balance between moderation and ending up with a “sterile” site. There is and always will be disagreement around the edges (past discussions can be found under IT/Website) but the feedback from the overwhelming majority (on and off the forum) feels the current balance is about right. If we had adverts then the “mod point” would have to be a lot looser – because sites that allow kicking and biting etc get 10x more traffic – but then most of the good contributors we have would leave and we would be just like so many other sites which are all over the internet. Also it is virtually impossible to display readable content plus adverts on a phone… and most people will adblock adverts anyway!

But, yes, we do need more people to start discussions. There is no shortage of good relevant topics.

We also need more people to spread the leaflets, which I will mail to anybody anywhere. They cost me near-zilch – £30 per 1000

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Remember you were for ages asking for a homebuilt section, so we provided that, and a lot of previous “non certified” material was moved into it.

And that is great, and the section is also fairly active. What triggered me here was the “do we need to grow” comment. What kind of comment is that? I don’t know what the purpose of this board really is. It is nice, it is civilized, it is easy going (easy to use, easy to follow), it is all that, but what is it really about? Does EuroGA represent the European General Aviation “community” ? all of it? IMO it represent a small part. A small part geographically and a small part when it comes to activity. It definitely can grow, ten folds and more.

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

I think one needs to grow EuroGA for two reasons:

  • A stream of people leaves naturally… due to getting out of flying, various other reasons… so unless you work on it, it would just shrink and shrink
  • It is an obvious fact (from talking to people when travelling) that most GA pilots in Europe have never heard of us

One cannot represent everybody, for many reasons. This is a member-contributed community. If we were a business and sold say 10000 €300/year subs, say a €3M sales, we would have a dedicated editor, say 10 of them, for every branch of GA, producing material to suit just about everybody, from backpack-chute flyers to bizjets. Obviously that is utopia… But that is what printed mags have to do – except they need to aim at who is actually buying the mag. Of course all these commercial ventures are really struggling nowadays… the printed mags are accordingly mostly dreadful as they try to appeal to a common denominator which is increasingly plumbing the depths of burger runs to £3 all day breakfast locations. In the USA there is some good stuff but the market is some 10x bigger… and even then the biggest mag is mostly shoe-licking reviews of top end stuff.

On EuroGA, the content will reflect those who are willing to hit the keyboard, in an informative manner. One could fairly easily speculate that certain branches of GA are more likely than others to do that… but those that don’t have only themselves to blame

OTOH if there is a lot of good potential contributors out there who simply don’t know about us (and I am certain that IS the case) then we need to spread the word

People could so easily leave leaflets at their local airfield but maybe only 1% do.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The EuroGA leaflets are nice. Maybe they could be made even clearer what EuroGA is in a future re-print?
If I remember correctly it says something like Europe’s only general aviation forum.
It could be clearer and say something like Web discussion forum for pilots.
Now you might think it is something like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Social_Forum or some EU funded bureaucratic group.

ESTL

Yeah – any suggestions welcome

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Hi Peter. Please send me some leaflets to distribute. I will PM you separately.

UK, United Kingdom
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