At least from my perspective a usergroup I was a member of for 4 years lost my interest because of a variety of factors. I heard the group was falling apart, so I decided to run for VP of Programs, and got to become VP of Programs for a year. Before I was VP of Programs and while I was VP of Programs every week I would come to help people using their Macs. Then about 10 months into my VP of Programs work, we had an insolvable issue. The leader of the weekly meeting group within the usergroup kicked me out even though I did everything humanly possible to solve the problem. He would not have me return. Partly because he didn't trust his own roudy behavior wouldn't cause me harm, and partly because he thought I was doing nothing but harm for the club. The latter was never true. He was even a former police officer. And sadly his suspicion was such he never let me return even after 24 months of banning me. I continued though to be VP of Programs for another 4 months, until the president of the club kicked me out. This even though I had finally written a couple articles in the club periodical, and helped bring some notable Mac figures to the club group meeting. I even stepped in to do publicity when the club publicity person was unable to do due to family issues, and this was authorized by the club's president.

Moral of the story, clubs need to treat their members as if they are the fiber of the whole group. If they don't, and start "sandboxing" every part of the club, many won't want to return, and clubs will die. If these clubs want to survive, they are going to have to treat others as they want to be treated. We all want to be a part of a nice social network. Losing such a social network is hard. I've been trying to find my niche network ever since.

"members are getting grayer and fewer in numbers". That sure seems to be the description of the MUG's that I have been to. But at least I know of no such internal strife as "gopher" describes. Meetings last an hour or two, a half-hour or better to get there, another half-hour or so to get home...unless you are really getting something interesting or worthwhile, you tend to drop off and then drop out.

Our MUG is a newly founded one being now exactly one year old, we have rapidly risen to a membership of nearly a hundred, and regularly get 40+ attendees at a meeting...

We have had top speakers like Alan Rosenfeld and Guy Gowan and have a good range of members from beginners and switchers right through to professional users and software developers...

MUGs might be changing, that is not the same as dying - if your MUG is held in the past by people trying to keep it like the "good old days" then maybe it is dying.

Visit our very simple Suffolk Mac Users site at http://www.suffolkmacusergroup.co.uk/Welcome.html and see that MUGs are very much not dying...