Hey T33, I like your idea and have to agree with you, there is excellent potential in the general idea started here, always has been. It's what attracted all of the original members. The names of the Moderators on the site homepage are literally the original "first" members here! We spent alot of time just shooting the breeze and enjoying each other's company and knowledge. The original webmaster who also identified himself as "Active Fan" was very involved. He set it up so the Mod's could add firearms to each of the categories. As long as the manufacturer was listed on the main index, we could add whatever we had time to. I was actually able to contact him almost immediately via email! Ha, imagine that? I would get a request to add an unusual firearm and after some research, I could get it added to the forum. That, and usually, a quick review to involve the original member and hopefully spark some interest across the forum. It worked very well for a couple of years!
We had a few issues with renegade members and there were some colorful exchanges with several of the "Mouthy" members, that in retrospect was a poor choice of solutions! I personally placed my size 11 shoe uncomfortably in my mouth. We all did at least a time or two! But the interesting thing was that it brought us together even tighter. We never had rules of the road that were so oppressive that you couldn't say what you wanted to say. We had/have limits of course to what is allowed, but we've always given people enough leeway to say what they wanted to say. I think that has always been one of the attractions of the site. Not only are you welcome here but you're also welcome to be yourself, for better or worse. Where some sites would edit you or remove you from the forum, we didn't agree with that method of editing. Yet everyone knows how far they can push things without waking up the silent censure, which was always rare and discussed/agreed upon by at least two Mods.
The problem started with the addition of aggressive marketing. Very aggressive!! It came and went a couple of times and each time we experienced a problem with privacy issues, the Webmaster's involvement began to get scarce. Then we received a notice from "Active Fan", the Webmaster, that he was upgrading the forum with faster servers, better software, etc., etc. Unfortunately those upgrades included some pretty horrific advertising! We had the usual banner ads from some of the big name dealers which were easily tolerated because they weren't aggressive in nature. But then we started getting pushy pop ups that would interrupt even casual reviews of a thread. You either agreed to read the garbage or you found yourself treading cyber-space. It really sucked and it got worse and worse. Several people (me included) started getting redirects to sites like Walmart, KMart and an occasional porn site. We suffered through that for several weeks and finally said "ENOUGH"!! We were losing members faster than we could gain them!! Active Fan denied responsibility for these crap attacks but we were able to provide enough examples that it couldn't be denied. Following that revelation, he pulled all advertising from the website. I want to say that it was around Thanksgiving +/-, I'm not sure anymore, that all contact with him was severed. As you can see we have no more advertising. We've tried to make contact with "Management", to no avail. I guess it is what it is and will hopefully play out in favor of the membership. I think that this discussion,( I hope anyway), will provide some hope to our tired group of Second Amendment Warriors...