I don't think that I know an awful lot about knives. I know for a fact that there are a few hundred members here who know more about that subject than I do.
My point is that I have amassed a sizeable chunk of my post count by trying to answer newbies' questions whenever I can. I wrote a search engine FAQ for this forum, I use the post report function to ask the mods to move new members' threads to forums where they're more likely to get an answer etc.
No, you don't have to get in line to say "thanks QS", just try to do your part to keep these forums worthwhile.
It's just getting awfully repetitive if you get to see new threads pop up here and there on a subject that has been discussed so many times before. Doesn't exactly improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
The Blade Discussion Forum has become so busy that many of the more specific questions that have not been discussed here before get buried in a truckload of "plain vs serrated", "Benchmade vs Spyderco" or "Victorinox vs Wenger" posts before anyone who might have the knowledge to answer it gets to read it.
When I join a forum, I search before I ask a question, I don't use it as a chat room, use meaningful titles, try to describe my problem in great detail and do my best to use proper spelling, grammar and punctuation and divide my posts into paragraphs here or there to make it legible (not referring to Metro but newbies in general here).
As for your reference to my age, that's precisely why I used to leave my age out when I noticed that people tend to play the age card whenever they disagree with someone or want to characterize a fellow member as being this or that. Not surprisingly, nobody asked me about my age when I did that, simply because an unbiased view of my posts shows that there's no reason to assume that age factors in on the content of my posts.
