Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesm
Thanks for the kind words. I think the point of the forum should be to facilitate the open sharing of information for the purpose of advancing the cause. That said, it's definitely not. It's a commercial enterprise, designed to make money for everyone except the folks who use it to try and gather information lol. Vendors don't come here to teach us anything, they come here to market products to their target audience. If that weren't the case and they were in fact here for the same reasons we are, we'd be about a year ahead of where we are now. Luckily, you can't stop the train. Once the floodgates open it's impossible to shut them again, and there will always be people here who are more interested in helping people solve problems than selling them something.
Just look at the state of FT86 tuning after only a few months of end-user visibility. It sucks that we have to figure this stuff out all over again by ourselves, but everything we troubleshoot our way through is something the next guy won't have to. The pros don't want to sell the farm. We want to make it a hippy commune, and we will inevitably win.
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It is a shame because I have most of my forum experience on a a forum where the masses extremely outweighed the vendors and the vendors were all about the community. Of course vendors paid money, but members could do the same and the forum never had disparity between the power of any user type (be it vendor, mod, paying member, lifetime member, unpaid member). Information there was shared freely and the vendors used their resources to further the community. They even had giveaways that were run and existed solely within the forum for the benefit of the members. I have a few stickied threads on there, and even though I haven't posted in months or years, I still get PMs from people asking questions or for advice and I answer ever time. That is the vibe that I don't feel coming from this place and it is my hope that people like you continue to push this forum in that direction.
I wish I could offer more dedication here, if I could, I would be posting screencasts too, doing technical writeups, and performing research. It is what I enjoy doing. Sadly, I dedicate about 55-65 hours per week to my job while still being a full time student
Now, lets stop the
and change this to :ontopic: (to the mods, we need a new smilie that has a sign with with highlighted in red for off topic and a green highlight below for on topic).