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Thanks for posting! I've re-read the guidelines. It's good to be reminded of these, I do enjoy a friendly community =). It's okay to bite your tongue occasionally for the greater good =D.

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Hikingness - My Hiking Log/Photos/Etc
Now includes my latest Trip Reports at the bottom!
(I'm good for recliner hikes if anybody wants to help me get my trail legs back)
About.Me/DustinDuBois

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That's one of the great things about PH. It's a great community of intelligent and interesting outdoor loving people. I've been on many other forums where posts got out of hand, driving good members away. It rarely happens here. I credit the group and the moderators.

We all have non-hiking things that we're passionate about. The trick is making every effort to stay focused on the discussion topic, and not hijack threads 'n' stuff. I'm as guilty as anyone for getting off subject..

Happy Trails!

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Jim's 2013 Hikes

...You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb. - Sir Winston Churchill

Yeah I get off-topic a lot too, I'll actively seek to avoid that =D.

I recently left a much larger internet community (the website had over 30,000 members, thousands of which used the forums and several hundred very active members, I even staffed there for a while) where it was much more difficult to keep things civil. People were too interested in maintaining their "right" to say whatever they wanted (while expecting no reprisals), rather than realizing that each website on the internet is like somebody's home (you can't say whatever you want in someone's home and expect no potential repercussions..) and it might be better to just swallow their words - or save it for a private chat. That place was like a second home for me until I was eventually driven away after more than 5 years of being a major contributor to the community, due to some very disrespectful people.

So, I've been quite happy to be a part of this community and appreciate the efforts to keep things civil. Sometimes your "right" to say whatever comes to your mind is not what's best for the community as a whole.

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Hikingness - My Hiking Log/Photos/Etc
Now includes my latest Trip Reports at the bottom!
(I'm good for recliner hikes if anybody wants to help me get my trail legs back)
About.Me/DustinDuBois

Interesting that there is actually a rule about changing the topic of a thread (hijacking). From my perspective, the topic of a thread should be expected to drift, as it does in any normal conversation, and I don't see any problem with that. I suppose that's a different thing than hijacking though -- changing the topic really abruptly and trying to make other people get off-topic too.

I think this forum in general is exceptionally civil, and well-rounded in just about every way. The mods and tech support are responsive and do a great job. There are enough active posters with a collective wealth of knowledge that someone has an answer for just about anything you could think to ask. Happy to be a member, and I hope PH.org will be around for years and years to come!

My previous forum experience was with a relatively small forum which got smaller and smaller over the 8-9 years I posted there, until it kind of disappeared recently. There was virtually no moderation, tons of spam (not spambots, but members just making posts with 100 smileyfaces and other random junk), topics were typically derailed after 1-5 replies, and the admin didn't really make any upgrades from the basic phpBB format to enable cool features. It was fun for what it was, but coming to PH.org felt like stepping into a nice friendly orderly town after living in a Lord of the Flies type of situation

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Joe hikes

Excellent input folks! Also, thanks geographics for bringing the guidelines back into the light Even us mods should re-read those every now and again

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http://www.craigmorecreations.com/portland-family-outdoors/
http://adamsawyer.com/

We should have a link to those somewhere. Also, I think they might need a little updating, because they mention commercial posts in Gear Talk but we now have a special classifieds area.

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-Dan
Site Tech Helper

Good call! Just noticed that myself =D.

_________________
Hikingness - My Hiking Log/Photos/Etc
Now includes my latest Trip Reports at the bottom!
(I'm good for recliner hikes if anybody wants to help me get my trail legs back)
About.Me/DustinDuBois

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