What Happened To AO?

[phantomhitman]

specialopspaintball.com has good forums, very active, a little too 'woodsy' but not as dumb as PBN.

ao fails because I left

[Mongoose]

I have tried pbn and a few others, but they are not the same..however i do like PBLegion
Just feels like home! "where is the 2 cent smily"

[drg]

Don't lose sight of the fact that AO remains the premiere site for Automag information, discussion and commerce. Thanks to the comprehensive archive, public, always-open search feature(!!) and active userbase (yes it's still huge), most questions about mags can be answered very quickly.

There is a tendency with all communities to lament the leaving of respected or longtime members but it's the job of those that remain to carry on.

[NewbieMagMan10988]

Allthough AO has been my favorite forum for a long long time, PBN does have it's strong points. AO's B/S/T section will never have the MASSIVE amounts of stuff. I look at this as a blessing and a curse, but if you're willing to do a little hunting you can find some sweet deals on PBN. I use PBN mostly for two reasons,

B/S/T
The good FAQ's and equpment guides (good for dissasebmly, trubleshooting, ect)

Other than that I feel like AO and MCB are overall better forums. The lack of "agg" kiddies helps alot. AO and MCB have allways been somewhere where I could get good informatoin of the obscure things I love about paintball (Desert Ducks, other old/rare things). The sites' own search feature helps with this (lets face it, the google PBN search is not so great). While PBN could have givien me answers, it would only have been after five or six pages of "D00d, WTF is a dEsssot dUck?!?!?!!one!1111"

I'm not one to tell people what to do, so go where ever you like. Ultimatly that's what it's all about.

[Motorhead]

It is NOT just AO that has lost membership !!

I am an Administrator of a Hobby R.C. Race Boating web site that just 2 years ago was having 1000% more activity than it does now. Are these ex members out of the sport ? ... Actually no, most are quite active doing it, only LESS active talking and tired of reading redundant information.

The World Wide Web in regards to specific subject message boards & chat forums is recent years have become a waste land of repeat questions, Few doing searches and worse yet little too NO past info there to find !!

Damn near every site I personally frequent threw the years has suffered some sort of HACK attack that either has disabled the site permanently, or caused a GREAT loss of archived information.

Don't know about you folks left here from days of old, but in subjects where I am confident enough to post accurate information, only do so maybe one or twice then move on.

Something like a teacher with that years class only, say it once or twice then teaching moves on.
When new blood comes and go's so frequently asking the same old stuff over and over the boards fall silent. Most are trolling for free info and willing to give nothing back

JMHO.

Scott

[Beemer]

I am an Administrator of a Hobby R.C. Race Boating web site

Which one.

[wolf13]

speaking of old info disappearing, I have noticed an increasing number of abandoned urls that have been squated on are using the robots text to disable archiving. Cockers got hit even worse though, the largest sites are gone now, and with em the archived info. when we started up customcockers.com just over a year ago, we weren't sure what was going to happen, and while its exceeded our expectations in some ways, I've noticed as well we have a hard time keeping people. even people that are dedicated cocker people and frequent posters on other forums, just haven't stuck around. Its getting better as the user base grows and the background builds up, but its still there. What I think has happened is a lot of people anymore just want to use the net and forums to socialize, rather then exchange info. what forums on many sites are most popular? the off topic forums of course. people over the years really have formed communities, and moving away from those communities is hard. A lot of boards have a pretty large demographic it seems of people no longer involved in that hobby, but still are frequent posters simply because of the community.

[LudavicoSoldier]

Where is Creative Mayhem at a time like this? I miss the AO meets... No better excuse to drive 10 hours to Canadia! Or Pittsburgh. Granted, I missed out of Shatnerball and the bigger meets, but the ones I did go to were a blast. Legends of AFTICA indeed.

[druid]

ao fails because I left

No, that's wrong...

AO phails because everyone's afraid to post...before someone slings the banhammer for seriously DUMB stuff...