An observation

[Cuppa]

Hi Jas,
I gotta admit I'm not really sure how you prefer to envisage the forum. From my perspective it seems that the stuff you want IS here & continues to be posted. We have the technical stuff, the bragging stuff, & the helping each other stuff. We also have the stuff in between that helps to keep the community strong. I don't know if that's what you think of as womens' weekly fingernail filing bollocks, but if so I suppose you could just not read it. I wouldn't want to lose any of it. Any online community, just like any other community is made up of a wide variety of folk with differing interests & needs, but generally with something in common to hold them together. I don't see this forum as any different. . By keeping this forum 'sensitive', by minding our p's & q's, it keeps it not just family friendly but everybody friendly.

Clearly you are feeling the forum is over sanitised & I'd agree that we wouldn't want things to get to the point of blandness, but I think this is unlikely to occur whilst we have the likes of Growlers Ghost Chilli thread, but when someone like ThreeDogs feels comfortable enough to share his distress at having to put his dog down it says that the community is working & supporting it's members. For folk like me (who live relatively isolated lives) forums such as this are our primary social contact, & as such need to have space for more than just that which brought us together. We do need to keep a balance, but I think that we need to also accept that that balance ebbs & flows over time. I can't see that we are at risk of losing any of the variety of aspects that we all value here.

I like to think of the forum as being like a virtual campfire. If I camped with you & others from here for a weekend I expect we'd talk a fair bit about Patrols, 4wd'ing & touring, it's what we have in common & it makes it easier to 'break the ice' but we'd talk about a hell of a lot more too. We might even have a couple of drinks! The better I got to know each other the more likely we'd be to share other aspects of our lives, We're all different.



Well that's how I see it anyway. Perhaps I should go back to filing my fingernails.