Ledgies who have disappeared
 

I was looking at the member list and sorted it by number of posts …. I looked at the top 25 people listed and many of them stopped posting a decade ago and I wondered, did they die? Stop being avid fans? What makes people disappear from this community? Twitter and instagram don’t really provide the same level of interaction…..


I have been here a long time but i don’t post often… yet I still drop in/log in….


Another statistic I noticed was: Most users ever online was 23,495, 07-18-2025 at 10:15 PM.


What happened that day???!!! What major FM news did I miss?


I think a lot of people have me on ignore, because rarely do I get any response.

I'm not ignoring you! :)

I know over at Reddit there are a lot of people who say they used to go to the ledge and stopped because the atmosphere became too negative for their taste. ( Although a lot of stuff appears there that was here first, so maybe more people are coming here than admit to it!) I suppose a few of the older folks that used to be here may have passed away, unfortunately , but probably for the most part, sometimes people just move on to a different stage of life and leave behind stuff like the ledge...? I know there were many years when I really never looked at it. It was chris's passing the got me back into it so strongly.

And I agree that the twitter and instagram stuff is not quite the same, I mean, i'm glad that young people are into the band but a lot of what they're talking about is the same repetitive shipper stuff with Lindsey and Stevie/silver springs, "with his pregnant wife in the crowd!" (no, not quite..) or Stevie and Chris being inseparable best friends (no, not really...) , "Lindsey doesn't get enough hate!!" (Stevie was no peach either...!) etc..

There's so much misinformation that keeps being spread around and repeated... it kind of rubs me the wrong way, and there aren't too many old timers around to really correct it with facts the way there are here.... Like there aren't many people that can say "X, Y and Z happened, and I remember because I was there." If I try and correct something, I'm often told I must be a lot of fun at parties :laugh: these young people are so sensitive. I mean, for me, one of the coolest parts about going through Mac groups on Facebook etc is reading through all the comments and seeing what people actually remember from their own experiences, not just what they have seen on social media. The younger fans seem more interested in making tiktoks of little clips etc... less interested in actual knowledge and ACCURATE band history.

That statistic you mentioned seems extraordinarily high 😆 I mentioned something like that to Marty a year ago when I saw a very high number also, and he said sometimes the counters get stuck and don't reset and that's how you end up with It looking like twenty five thousand people were on the ledge , where really that may have been cumulative over a week or something. I don't think it gets quite that much attention lol

--Lis

There were several comments on Reddit that were very specific about people here on this board being the reason they no longer come to the Ledge. I mean, they named names of the posters.

yep, I saw.

--Lis

I remember ledgies who doesn't post anymore. chiliD had very interesting points of view. I didn't always agree with him, and that's where the exchange of opinions became more interesting. I understand he passed away a few years ago; he is missed.

But I also remember ledgies from the old Ledge format. John B used to wrote posts that were like beautiful pieces of literature. I don't find his user in the member list here. I think he left The Ledge before this new version replaced the old one. Just like BN, whom I remember more than anyone because he was the only Ledge member I've ever met in person. On a business trip to San Jose in May 1998, he picked me up from the hotel one afternoon and we went to Sausalito, to The Record Plant, passing by the school where S&L met. BN was very kind.

It was a little hostile here for a while. I remember someone created a forum called Seven Wonders and a bunch of people went over there and that became even more hostile. The infighting was terrible.

I don’t even know what reddit is. Is that like quora?

That's pretty rich. The posts I've seen here are tame compared to the vitriol and nonsense that happens on Reddit.

Seems like you're on a witch hunt...

You know, pre Facebook, you could barely keep up with the number of posts on here. Chit Chat was often busier than the all the band forums, combined. Social media completely changed what we had here, and it's kind of amazing that the Ledge is still here at all. Thinly veiled finger pointing aside...

People do come and go on all message boards. I belong to 2 more message boards and the same thing happens there. I was concerned for Macfan4ever because he or she used to post here several times a day and then disappeared. Someone said when Stevie fired Lindsey and was getting heat on this board many Stevie fans stopped posting or coming to the board. This board is like a reality show. We are all on an island. No one new can come but people disappear. Who will be the last one standing? Who will have the last offical post?
Message boards are so 1990s and early 2000's before social media started blowing up.

I've had someone threaten my life on this board and curse me to hell. I've had someone tell me I was not around long enough to communicate with another member. I've gotten a member in a jealous rage because I communicated with their best buddy here. I've gotten private messages from secret information about certain Mac members that is not shared on this board and also about meeting after a concert.
It's definitely a mixed crowd.

I don't know what quora is although I've heard of it lol. Reddit is a place where there are message boards for just about everything, including fm. And yes i remember the seven wonders fiasco, I think that's just the nature of message boards to have infighting because folks have very different opinions and get defensive. But it shouldn't get personal. .. unfortunately many times it does.

--Lis

2016 was a particularly rough year with the election. There were some Russian bots here that vanished after 2016. I believe for a time no political discussion was allowed because things went off the rails.
2018 was another wild time with Lindsey's firing.

My last little absence was because of a glitch of some sort. I kept getting “server not found”. I was only able to log back in after Lis posted a link on Reddit. I’d thought TL died for a long time.

A few months ago I noticed you cannot get to this site from Microsoft Edge anymore. I thought it was down too. I have to get here by Google Chrome.

I was on Seven Wonders and I am also on Ivory Keys. I'm not sure how long I have been on the Ledge, but I check in every day. I don't always post, but I like to see if anything new is going on. I love having discussions about the band, but Ivory Keys is not the place for that. Here if I have a bone to pick I can do it. These are tough times now with so much other social media out there and a lot of AI nonsense. It's nice to be able to come here.

I'm not sure how long I have been on the Ledge,

I see I joined in 2007. Almost 20 years!

I don't remember that error but sometimes it still appears the database error, server timout or handshake error, and I have to retry. It seems the server get out of resources, oversaturated and they reboot it or clear RAM or buffers, something like that.

And it seems to happen the most on the weekends.

The strangest is not the people that were on here long ago….i notice there are periodically people that come on The Ledge and post incessantly for a year or two….many thousands of posts. And then completely disappear.

Mildly disappointed this wasn't the scintillating true crime thread I'd expected from the title.

For many years a date in 2018 was listed as the time with record number of users online. I assumed it was related to the firing. That inglorious brouhaha seemed to bring many back out of the woodwork, including myself after a decade hiatus.

I surmise that the bulletin board format is a bit outmoded these days, especially for Gen Z (internet native generation) or younger. Without enthusastic fresh young blood coming in, you're left with a handful of reminiscing codgers (again, myself included).

There is also just the dearth of novelty in what can be discussed. The era I joined the Ledge, between The Dance and Say You Will, the FM/solo space was practically alive with possibility. Even Chris gave us a solo album after stepping back from the band. Contrast post-firing, where the best The Ledge can hope for in terms of novel content is our dear friend Villavic's selection of best twenty-year-old threads for the week.

Long live The Ledge and all who sail in her!

the fact that 2007 was a whole TWO DECADES AGO now is just.......my head can't compute.....:distress:

not that I have a nostalgia for the world in 2007,it's just the math doesn't math for me...like.....when I think 20 years ago my brain thinks oh that was the 90s or something...

Or when I hear 2017 my brain goes, oh that was like what 5 years ago now? :(

Sigh.

Yes! It seems there's nobody checking at the datacenter until monday morning when they restart or tune services.

The odd thing is that we have very little traffic here on the weekends, and that's when it goes down.

Maybe because the servers host other webpages. Usually those services run different websites on server farms, clusters, etc. So maybe other sites do consume a lot of memory, traffic, CPU, etc., on weekends. I'm only guessing, because when you hire a hosting service, the contract can include performance guarantees, resource allocation, etc. But of course, those contracts are more expensive.

Anyway, I still find The Ledge a good place to discuss, read interesting information, or simply have some fun.

Just curious, are there other cool forums like this one, not threads in Reddit or other sites where all kinds of topics are discussed, but entire places dedicated to bands or musicians, similar to The Ledge?

That's my guess as well.

I don't know if there are many dedicated bands pages these days, or not. I'd ASSume most of them are just run off of social media pages.

I joined in 2003. I think i started lurking in 1998/9. It took a while for me to jump on the whole forum bandwagon and actually join the Ledge. Almost 28 years ago. Whoa.

I still chuckle when I see these 1990’s post icon smiley faces. So last century.

:laugh: :blob2: :xoxo: :shrug:

No one can update them to something a little more 21st century? Even early 21st century would be fine.

Can you believe that term…. Early 21st century, turn of the century….

25 years ago. Omg

I wonder how many ledgies (out of the total) who still enter to read but haven't posted anything in years are among those who have achieved the 10,883 views of this thread (up to this point).