I’ll preface this by saying that I have just come back to the board after some time off - I seem to revisit every so often and then life sort of takes over.
Being bored tonight I decided to look back at other threads I’d become involved in (tres sad but there you go!) and had a laugh seeing stuff from a couple of years back - one thread kicked off big time six months later and I never got the chance to argue back - damn I feel cheated! I was even insulted in absentia - the cheek of it!
Does anyone cringe when they see what they wrote ages ago - now preserved for all eternity in the archives?
Hey, I voted to periodically empty the trash frankly to Dale when he was talking about the storage space involved in our beloved archives. Face it, no matter how much fun we have, its the real chiffy stuff about whistles, makers and music that should be saved, not my bilious rants, Nano’s one-liners, Stony’s “sophistry (tip o’ the hat to Murph, there)”, Bloomfields periodic insults etc etc.. I reckon thats about 8 or 9% of the total posts. Also, I bet that many of the posted photos are now dead links as we change Net services etc etc. Even those of the skinny chick.
not me. my posts are, without exception, highly intelligent and informative. I think they should be collected and printed. A bestseller is dormant in this message board.
Nope. I try to mollify my posts, there can only be a couple of dozen I’m truly ashamed of.
I’d also vote to chuck out the old stuff periodically, even the whistle stuff. How many times do you see the same questions asked and answered, that were there to read if people could (be bothered to) find the threads?
I wonder if deleting old threads would reset people’s post counts, though? And if it did, would that really matter? [/code]
Does anyone cringe when they see what they wrote ages ago - now preserved for all eternity in the archives?
Actually thinking more about it - this particular cringe was for the flame war which kicked off a long time after I had finished with the thread and not so much for what I wrote. Which of course was logical, reasonable, considered and unquestionably right. It’s those poor people who can’t control what they say in their posts that I feel sorry for :roll:
For those who can be bothered the relevant thread is here
Many of the same questions get asked over and over again. I find using the search feature quite often to re-read (my) previous posts… especially the ones with pictures and links. It’s often easier to point out a previous thread instead of retyping a new one.
Actually, searching doesn’t always work as well as I’d like. For instance, I would like to make my own whistles, and just did a search of the whistle board for “whistle AND making NOT OT”, hoping to find all the posts that were about whistle making but were not OT posts.
Result:
Search found 1423 matches
Addtionally the first 14 topics returned (just shy of one percent) are as follows:
Temptations of ALBA
Sticky: OT: Political…and sometimes religious
[ Poll ] On topic: pronouncing “whistle”
December update
35,000 year old ‘flute’ discovered in Germany?
the movement from whistle to flute
The BEHEMOTH LEGENDARY Everybody on the Forum is a Cutie-Pie
FS: Sindog (Sindt-Feadog Hybrid)
anyone know anything about these whistles?
Dale Hears From Davy About the Davy Spillane Low Whistle
Technique on the whistle
tinwhistler’s day jobs
Everybody listen to my first 9 notes!!
Old whistle
Post #4 is about Mack.Hoover’s redesigned shop (He’s a maker, so I guess that’s a valid return), and #13 is about Lost-in-North-Dakota’s first whistle. pretty well on target for my search. However, the other twelve were pretty much useless to me, and the thought that there are over 1400 more to go through is pretty frustrating, to say the least.
For this reason, it’s often quicker to just ask the question again and hunch your back for the barrage of responses saying,“Learn to use the search engine.”
Just thank your lucky stars that the board isn’t on yahoo groups. One group I belong to has an archive of about 60,000 messages and when you search it only covers the current page - you have to click on next page repeatedly for the search to continue. I tried that about once as you might imagine. The same questions just get asked again and again on that group.
Nah, there’s a lot to be said for short term memory. Why give up those advantages just to learn you were really far less clever than you once thought you were.
Gerry1: If that’s the worst example of a flaming thread you can think of you should be in good shape. That one’s not exactly the stuff of nightmares, but some threads should be marked with a skull&crossbones. I guess those usually end up locked.
Overall I think I’ve kept my basest instincts in check, so I’m not too chagrined by posts of xmas past.
Oy.
Ummmm…in that case, of COURSE I do! What a silly question! 
