Hi Brian---- where I'm getting confused is are you talking about the individual forums or the Pub?Brian Lee wrote:The boards here have become much the same thing. Lots of static. Lots of noise, and less and less of the root cause they were initially created to support. Waaaaaay back when, back when Teri K was in her teens probably , we didn't have a splintered board. Everyone who came here did so to talk about whistles, or music, or a particular maker etc. We even had many more makers takling then. I wonder how many of our current numbers have even read through Dale's site? It's called Chiff and Fipple - and it deals almost exclusively with the Irish tin whistle. There is a small section on home gorilla breeding, but apart from that, it's solid.
Over the past few years, it's been said that the boards have reached a "critical mass", and were just not manageable as they once were. However true that may be, it strikes me as highly curious that there never really seemed to be a need for management at the onset...but now we have 4 moderators just trying to keep up with civility.
As has been pointed out before, there are PLENTY of boards on the internet for discussion of any topic you like: Politics, religion, more politics, sexual orientations, genome splicing, the cost of fruit/monkeys/spare organs in India...hell, you can probably find a forum for how to make money starting up your own fake Irish pub. And yet the balance here is more towards this trend and constantly growing further away from it's origins.
I've found that I post less and less anymore, and many of our more experienced posters (and players for that matter) have given up completely on C&F as a whole ages ago. As it stands, I fully expect to drop further and further down the total posts rank and file. If it's true we *have* reached this mystical critical mass, my fear is that C&F is due to go supernova at any time...with nothing left but a dead core...just your every day, average black hole.
It seems to me, as Wormdiet pointed out, that within the individual music forums (UP, whistle, flute, ITM) that people stay on the topic quite well. If there are not interesting topics for you in the UP forum, that is certainly a problem, but it does not seem like it would be related to people bringing up topics that have nothing to do with music. It must be related to something else.
If you are talking about the Pub, is it that you just don't like having an anything-goes Pub? Are you saying that in the old days people in the Pub all talked about music? I thought, but I could certainly be wrong, that the Pub was created to keep conversations that weren't pertinent to the instruments or music out of the music forums. If you don't like the Pub, then could you just go to the UP forum and not go to the Pub?
I guess I feel sort of irked because here are all these advanced people saying they want to have interesting conversations about music and instruments but they can't. There is nothing more that a lot of us would like than to hear some interesting discussions about music or the instrument we are trying to play. Is it that beginners butt in too much? That you would have to explain so much to them about an esoteric topic that it would become not worth it to bring something up? I have seen some knowledgeable people get treated quite badly for their efforts to pass on information or give help. I have seen instrument makers get treated quite badly as well. Is it that there aren't enough advanced people remaining to get a good conversation going? Is it really the Pub that is stopping the conversations about music and instruments? Why couldn't these conversations take place in the music forums? I am just frustrated because I would like to hear the conversations that people are alluding to. Maybe if some of the advanced people still here started some discussions, other people might come back. Maybe it is more a companionship thing than a discussion thing. I don't know. Oh well.
) . The big difference over here is that the political, whimsical, religious (yikes!) and otherwise non-musical matters are aired over here "in t'pub", and the ITM forum (the only other one of much interest to me personally) is generally allowed to remain civilly on-topic (quiet at times though it be as a result). Nobody's going to change the world by spouting here about their latest hobby-horse, and most people aren't going to keep reading discursive crap that goes on for day after day. The silent majority around here are probably silent because they're just not reading the bilge. The scroll wheel is a great invention!