Thanks for the kind comments Christian, David, Keith and Mark.
It was certainly an excellent day out - a successful meet up with an impressive turn out, which I think truly demonstrates the strength of the community behind phpBB project, and the passion which drives it. It was really good to meet a such a fun, friendly, dedicated and passionate group of individuals who clearly care about what they do.
As far as the day itself went, Pizza Express were really good for accommodating the group - for those who don't know already I did negotiate with the management to ensure that we wouldn't require a deposit for the booking of 10 people. I trust those who were with the main group enjoyed the 14 mile round trip to the Trafford Centre including Christian's pre-planned tour of the Trafford Centre's entertainment facilities, including the bowling alley, arcade and casino but to name a few. On a serious note - despite Laser Quest's incompetencies (in terms of answering the phone and accommodating a group of 6 people... certainly a place which won't be considered in the future), I do think it went really well overall and those who haven't seen Manchester before got a magical mystery tour (to use the term which Keith coined) of some of it's suburbs via Tram and Bus. The Apple Store/breaking computers was good fun nonetheless too.
To repeat what seems to be consensus amongst the majority of the group - I do agree that it would be great to make these meet ups a regular occurrence, especially for the benefit of those who were unable to attend this time around. I've also learnt quite a bit from organising this event - any future events will run even more smoothly. What I didn't realise initially was the number of people willing to make a weekend of it and stay in hotels - so possibly next time we could make arrangements for everyone to stay in the same hotel and perhaps centre events around the hotel itself - and make it the rendezvous point as opposed to an unexpectedly inadequately sized Starbucks. Any other feedback about this event would be greatly appreciated. Overall though, the meet up can certainly be declared an overwhelming success.
As Yuiry mentioned to me, I'd be more than happy to write up a report/blog post about the Meet up - and if anybody has additional photographs of the event which they would like to share then please do link to them from this thread - maybe they could be included in the blog post.
Thanks once again to everyone for attending
