Okay, okay, I'm not perfect. I know what you're thinking, "How can anyone like that chiseled featured Adonis be any less than perfect?" Well, I'm not, I make mistakes. And I made a doozey.

As you know, I like knives, and a THR moderator I know suggested a bizarre forum (with a heavy foreign membership) where a certain brand of knives was discussed. It went from bad to worse really fast. I don't like people who bash America, have crappy work ethics and generally piss me off while safely hiding behind a computer screen in their mommy's laundry room.

So, as I have done before, I wrote a PM to the forum's owner and also two PMs to their admin for disconnection. Nothing. Nothing for over a week. And I don't want my business or my reputation to be linked to this place.

Now get this, to make sure I would get banned I wrote an open letter, told the membership point-blank I was tired of the childish antics and to openly trash me to cause a incident. So as metric and foreign forums have done so many times they even screwed that up.

I have often stated that if you show me a cyber-fan I'll show you an idiot. Yikes, it's worse than I thought.

Definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

If you lived closer we'd hang out and you'd be able to drop this afinity for forums. Forums as a rule suck. This one is pretty good as it is not crowded yet. With the inevitable progress and crowds will come the idiots with it.

Like you I too enjoy a decent and orderly discourse and a moment to intelligently beg to differ. I respect others opinions and others should be able to beg to differ and move on. The average forums are not the place for these types of expectations. More often than not you will truly be having a battle of wits with unarmed oponents. Thats a fact. And when lacking in the intelligence department and being a mod or admin the solution is to ban...the coward and idiots easy way out.

Like when your friend from HDtalking brought his self serving malevolence here. He was verbally challenged by me and others but encouraged to speak on and stay as he may learn something. Instead he showed his true colors by trying to get others on board with his BS as he was used to over there and when that didn't work out he left. Occasionally you'll meet decent posters.... THAT person from HDTalking is the typical forum poster. A paper tiger. A keyboard commando.

Well, I was blinded by the light. The knives the forum owner made were +200 bucks, built of titanium, and they had several good reports from the major blade magazines. Yikes, his followers were European children. I do not mean adults who are childish, I mean actual minors. Unless these kids were children of privilege, I doubt any one of them had the Euros to buy these knives.

In fact, I think I was the only one to post a picture of the knife. The only other ones I saw were from fan-boys on YouTube.

BI63, I know you've had problems with several bike forums that catered to metric owners. But now more and more I am finding that our concerns relate to the entire world of social networking. I just don't see how a relatively narrow specialty hobby of collecting jackknives is so fouled up.

Most forums in general.

Its not the subjct matter thats the problem.Man kind is f' up.

LOL. Well, I could have told you that!

The problem is that a forum is a business. A man invests in a forum just like any other service venture. He sells advertising, and promotes the products of those advertisers.

In the case of the forum I mention, the owner is a knife designer, and he is currently showcasing the 2.0 version of that knife. The worst secret in the world (and for all to view on YouTube) is that the 1.0 version was rife with manufacturing Q/C flubs and ultimately safety issues. When the 2.0 version was launched the question in the knife industry was not about the knife itself, but if these errors were addressed and repaired.

Why that owner and designer lets a bunch of kids flame everyone, use the f-word in every post, and due to the forum's large European presence trash Americans--the potential buyers of his knife--confounds the heck out of me.

It's so bad that if I owned the place I would shut down the forum, let it sit empty for a few weeks and launch a new forum--this time finding moderators to clamp down on rules we find standard boilerplate.

If some potential client of mine asked about the knife I don't know what I would say. You have to remember that I too have a business, and allowing his children to trash me ultimately hurts my business. I do not advertise, the competency of my business is only as good as the last knife I have sold or polished.

BTW, I feel so strongly about this issue that even if the knife gets fixed I am not going to carry it as a an inventory item.

BTW, there are many reasons to get rid of a forum. While you may have regretted joining a forum, the board administrator still views you as a "potential client." I routinely get notifications on the sales promotions of banner advertisers from forums where I am listed as banned. There is a link at the bottom of such 'updates' to have your name removed, but the promotions continue.

Additionally, while I give a rip on whether that place has sharp knives or not, I got a notification yesterday to my private e-mail from a member that needed cutlery info. I had forgotten to shut of my automatic notification. I wrote back to explain the situation, but also had to go back into that forum's user file to delete all of my previous settings.

Of course, nothing you put into a computer is ever really deleted. The admin claims they cannot delete your posts because "it breaks the flow of existing threads." Not my problem. If I was that important to them when I patronized the place then perhaps they should have treated me better.

Truth be told, I wonder about their intentions. After all, I had to repair and fix their new and improved knife. Yes, adjusting the pivot and replacing loose screws is a minor job, but I also had to repair and straighten their factory grind and sharpen that new knife, as well.

What forum owners do not (or will not) understand is that treating a 'client' poorly leaves a lingering after-taste. I still carry that knife, but the first guy who takes a shine to it gets a 75 dollar discount just so I can move it. Most of that displeasure emanates from the fact that "if you know the painting then you know the artist." Statistics show that if you have a bad retail experience then you tell seven other people. And having teenage trrolls run roughshod over your forum tells the entire www.

Hey Tourist. Hows by you these days?I been riding like a MF'er with the seasons end looming large. November 1st I am basically done until maybe April? Was out yesterday but had to wait till about 9am for the fog to lift and the temps to come up a pinch.It was high 40's. Did manage to tour southwestern New Hampshire till late afternoon.

The only thing about your quote is I have found and I been guilty of the same is that forewarned is not necessarily fore armed. In other words in that particular forum I knew from a number of posters warning me in advance about the "lay of the land". Unfortunately I had to learn the hard way.

Despite the many many injustices occurring on said forum and which is done subversively(behind the scenes),dishonestly and not up front the forum stumbles along reeling in new "fish",many posting 100% oblivious to the conniving and dictatorial way things are done there under the false guise of "brotherhood". That word "brotherhood" used incorrectly sures suckers them in. I know in time many will come to see it for what it is. Then it becomes a challenge of integrity or not...many of the posters who had warned me and who have been banned still go back,lol.

And its to bad. It really could have been a good thing. Any time you have the few dictating to the many and calling itbrotherhood....nothing good comes from it and it eventually falls victim/prey to agenda's greed,power and ignorance.

Real 2 wheeled brotherhood is dead. Is all infiltrated with the superficial yuppy scumbags version of it.

Yeah, I know. I regret it, but I know.

But who would'a thunk that a jackknife and political forum would be run be European teenagers from their mommy's basement? More to the point, what kind of knife designer allows it?

Dim times, but I now know how the entire continent of Europe got overrun by a Austrian lieutenant who cannot keep his feet off a table in a beer hall. Yikes, you jump up on a table in a biker bar and you'd better be buying drinks or doing a striptease...

Quality of content is not as important as shear number of hits. Another classic mistake of quantity over quality.

I'd rather go into battle with 3 die hard got my back brothers than 30 pay for play. Unfortunately that is not the way of the world these days.

Today ones back has been reduced to becoming a knife sheath for someone/somebodies knife. Its all about watching out for your own 6.

...well, some of my best clients are mercenaries, but I digress...

For me it's a never-ending sewage stream of disappointment. Cheap people, cheap ideals, cheap cars, and a cheap society. If there's a way to cut corners, people do it. No wonder there are no real bikers or statesmen anymore.

But, ya' know, sooner or later I'm going to be the bad guy in this. At some point I'm going to let a poser take a beating. Or some Oprah watching easy rider is going to have to pay for her own pre-natal medical care. Or some banger is going to get his head shot off because no one cares about his racial plight.

And when that day comes some social apologist is going to turn to me and say, "Tourist, you saw this coming decades ago, and you took your real Harley, your Soc Sec money and your precious suburban free time and let this sluggard hit the cement deck. Where is your humanity?"

You watch. Now that I left the forum in question, these jerks will start feeding on each other until there's no more free lunch.