KillerBee;
Good morning to you my cyber friend, I hope the weather is what you can handle this morning on your side of the big hills.
Regarding forums in general, I'll admit that I've still not figured out what percentage of people who are involved in any given activity are inclined to join a forum connected to it. By that I mean I'm not clear on whether the "forum folks" represent 1% of the people involved or 10% for example.
This site was mentioned by John Barsness in a magazine article back in the day, which led me here and was the first forum I joined if memory serves. There were then others that I joined over time, some where my life and interests changed so I became less and less involved.
For instance there was a time that I was more involved in a knife/axe forum as all things sharp, stabby and cutty have been a lifelong passion of mine for at least as long as things that go bang or twang. As an aside the "twang" part might surprise you since I don't post about them much, but yah, there's 5 bows hanging in the garage and buddy has another one so I guess that makes 6???
Anyways I was somewhat active in the blade oriented forum but drifted away mostly because I both stopped grinding my own blade shapes at that point in my life and had more or less settled on blades that worked for my purposes then.
To me the value of forums is seeing how other people with similar interests who live in different places than me - places that like as not I'll never get to see in person - enjoy that activity. It's educational and entertaining to me to learn that.
Surely some things translate across geography fairly well, so we can chat about pillar bedding a rifle or what final grit they like on a particular blade steel for final sharpening, but other things less so.
For instance as I've mentioned we'll see less whitetail down here in an entire 3 month season than many of our friends will see on a bad afternoon, so their hunting techniques and even what they choose to shoot is going to be quite dissimilar to my own you know?
These days there are a couple other places where I'll stop by from time to time, one of them a BC based forum where most of the content deals with BC issues as far as hunting, fishing and the outdoors, but not exclusively. It's more heavily moderated than here for sure, but for the most part I've found it's not impossible to be honest and share opinions on important issues there.
Like Ed, I've bought and sold a bunch of stuff on gunnutz over the years but honestly that's the bulk of my personal experience there or said differently I don't wander into the forum sections that much, especially not the hunting portion.
Anyways Darren, as I've been known to type before - there's many roads to Mecca - and I'm not inclined to attempt to tell anyone my road is the only road. We're all going to find the road we're supposed to be on, well or not I suppose, but that's individual choice, free will and all that good stuff.
All the best to you folks for the rest of this weekend sir and all the best as we head into the Christmas season.
Dwayne
