You guys are right...it is difficult for a lot of people to stay here when the content of questions does not truly match that of the more focused sword discussion sites. Here, we are much more used to a community of knife folks, not so much sword folks. Have any of you read any of the knife threads on SFI? Not very strong discussion there. You can sometimes get some action, but SFI and BFC are not really competing to be master of all edged-tool/weapon discussion.
I think many repetitive topics have been exhausted in the minds of many people, my own included. It is hard to avoid these though, when the majority of the traffic that comes through here is from people who are typically browsers of the remainder of BFC.
Between BFC, SFI, Netsword, CKD, KF, and all these other places, there is sometimes just too much to look over. When someone asks a serious question here regarding a historical issue or sword type thing, usually in the first 2 or 3 responses you hear "go ask on sword forum" and if that happens, they may get the answer they're looking for. While it is important that information is shared regardless of where, we are effectively keeping the serious discussion elsewhere. I have noticed certain individuals here have been very verbose, patient, and have used excellent judgement in answering questions and teaching about various aspects of history and weaponry (you should know who you are, and thanks!), it is nigh-impossible to force a mass-migration of such discussion over to this forum, especially when there are several other locations that currently handle such things and BFC as a whole has a fair amount of stigma attached to it.
Perhaps in the future I will work on some kind of disclaimer regarding posting discretion and what-not, but right now I don't think I have the time to determine how exactly to put it forward in a positive way.
I do sometimes wish this forum would flood over with discussion that is normally kept in more topic-specific sections of sites like SFI or Netsword, but I think when a few people come in with good intentions, they either get pushed away or they get discouraged by the lack of participation (again, relative to aforementioned sites).
I don't think this forum is worth ignoring, but it will undoubtedly slow down from time to time. If there is more we can do in the future, either on *my* end or on the typical user end, feel free to bring up suggestions or what-not.
