I mostly lurk here now (plenty of good material to read) but I wanted to both shout out this forum, and note that rec.windsurfing is essentially dead...ONE windsurfing post in the month of May. You guys and Boards Magazine are the places to be serious (well, as serious as one can be) about windsurfing.)

blogged about it here

www.peconicpuffin.com/the_peconic_puffin/2010/06/the-rise-and-fall-of-recwindsurfing.html

and wrote about it in the U.S. Windsurfing Magazine.

Agreed Decrep

I'm getting nostalgic now, I feel old talking about newsgroups

But here at least we have Stewie, the hamburger maker.
(Let's see if he still around...)

I use to lurk there quite often, when seabreeze was just a toddler. I remeber a lot of flaming especially the 'Fin Wars' between Wardog-Surfingsports and Bill Kline-GSPORT (did nothing for the sport). It was pretty informative in its day with nearlly all the great names of a decade ago posting. I don't really understand the decline (maybe being unmoderated had something to do with it) never the less I have a happy home here.
RIP rec.windsurfing - long live Seabreeze

One of the reasons for that has to be that its a news group and you have to set up a news reader to read them. Web forums on the other hand are accessible by browser. I can't get news groups at work. At home I don't bother any more. I don't even use an email/news client, just the browser.

There was an almighty battle going on over at rec.skiing.alpine. It went on for years.

Stewie is the man if we lost him on seabreeze we are buggered

I don't speak for Mr Puffin, but news groups as a whole seem to be taken over by people that hide behind anonymous user id's and add nothing constructive to any threads. I don't think Puffin was either annoyed with the discussion or the people behind it. I suspect he was, like me, annoyed at the idiots that took over.

In the 'old days' they use to have real email addresses and people stood behind what they wrote. With the advent of SPAM people hide their email addresses and it seemed to encourage some people to become painful. Whether it was people with heaps of usernames arguing with themselves, or people outright abusing others.

I found Brucie's apparent mode of operation was to ask a question (either in person or behind an alias) for which he already had an answer prepared. On the other hand Bill Kline's discussions with others about fins and Wardog's responses to that were generally okay. It often sparked some debate about why a fin worked or if a particular fin would work for someone.

I used to haunt an aus cars newsgroup and it went from being a good conversation amongst 'mates' about cars (years back), to where a few people felt they owned the group and would actively discourage others from contributing.

Anyhow, that's my point of view, and I think any form of forum on the internet needs some sort of moderation. Without it, things just get out of hand.

Thank you. Points taken.

It does become objectionable when cliques take over, and follow a private agenda amongst themselves. (Next passionate discussion please!)

Mrgob said...

Not sure I follow Puffins point? Is it spirited and heated argument (about fins or any other aspect of our sport) that he's objecting to, or just who happens to be making it?

Neither. In rec.windsurfing there were one or two people (one person, really) who would often drown out everyone else with endless 500 word responses to every single point of debate (along with singing his own praises). If you wanted to actually debate a point it quickly got boring as no viewpoint was allowed to stand without this guy going on ad nauseum.

The other phenomenon recdot had was Brucie, who I believe you're familiar with. Just last week in an iwindsurf forum he had a conversation going between three of his characters. The thread's title was Shoulder Injuries and windsurfing...an important thread...now imagine you click on it to find out about shoulder injuries and instead you find a puppet theater.

I loved rec.windsurfing and its heated and spirited debates in the old days. Still enjoy that kind of exchange now in other forums. But any party can be ended by bad guests that you can't throw out.

I see only too well what you mean Puffin. I contribute under the name Gurgletrousers, and was a part of that I windsurf shoulder thread. I hadn't realised that Brucie was also playing two other characters besides his pointless self!

I'm relatively new to computers and contributing to forums though I've always read them in the past. For the record I followed everybody elses example and made up a silly name (Gurgletrousers elsewhere, and Mr Gob here) because I thought that was the thing, and not because I was trying to hide.

As with all fanatical long term sea users I tend at times to think there's little else to learn about what to like and dislike, but the beauty of good threads is that they can force a rethink, and make us try things differently.

No, indeed not!

He has over 50 different names and is the worlds greatest living theoretical expert on everything known, or yet to be discovered.

We could learn a lot from him!

so it's true then, someone did indeed rec windsurfing