Toby, you are truly an asset to the Expedition Community and to this forum. I'm thankful for you as I've learned to slow down my life to find time to read your 3102-word posts. And enjoy them. Thank you.
And to think when I was in school I really hated writing a five-paragraph essay. Lol
Thank you though. I will admit, that post and a few of my others get a little long. I rarely do it on purpose but when we start talking about aspects of life, there's lots of them and lots of different facets to those aspects.
The joy of a forum is you have multiple people to talk to and about multiple things.
If you have no interest in that topic you can just scroll on by. Just like the knob on a radio and the button for a TV channel.
It is an open discussion of course, and if someone has something positive or interesting to interject that is part of the beauty of these forms.
However, when posters sit around with a radar hard on just waiting to correct someone, prove them wrong, or throw back up something they posted... it takes most of the fun out of it. But I guess some people's goal in life whether they know it or not is to be a fun sucker.
Some people can't help themselves I guess like I can't help myself to tangent off at the mouth.
But I prefer my mostly positive and pleasant and jovial, nostalgic tone even... where I only criticize the world, companies and certain groups of people but never start out trying to be critical or personally demeaning of other posters.
We had an old guy on one of the lawn mower and tractor forums who was just so hateful that more than once he got in trouble with the moderators.
He kept an immense database of Craftsman part numbers and model numbers, not like you can't look that up anytime you need it, and if anyone would speak anything of a general nature about the particular model previously mentioned in the thread was slightly different he would be the absolute first to jump out there and call their statements wrong of course very critically, harsh and demeaning.
He apparently couldn't handle concept of things being about the same.
They are lawn mowers! They run on gas, they're usually single or twin cylinder engines, they have Magneto's, flywheels that spin around and around and they usually used to cut grass , at least when you put them on a riding mower.
Forums are where people come to get general information on where to start their diagnosis or repair procedure. Generalizations are just fine. Then when you get more specific and to helping the poster with their specific repair and repeated post back and forth, that's when you take care of any specific differences in their model. Just like with Fordgirl and her 5.4 32-valve Navigator.
A lot of the specifics don't make much difference at her previous stages of working on it. Just a matter of getting the head off. Yes, it's a little bit harder on a 32-valve because there's less room but it's the same basic procedure. Keep removing stuff and tweak things out of the way until you can get the head out of there, which she did quite nicely by the way.
It doesn't matter if someone says to use a 13 mm to remove the power steering pump and some gotcha poster jumps on there and says you're wrong. It's a 10mm.
It's just unnecessary and I guess it says something about their character.
It says something about my character that I take those posts as combative and then my claws come out and I'm willing to double down and go at it with them.
This is not fun and enjoyable for me but I feel the need. Others don't like watching the arguments play out from what I have gathered on forums. I will admit, sometimes it's enjoyable to see a couple of members really go at it until the moderators shut one down as I have seen on other forms but most people see it as an annoyance.
For me it goes back to who threw the first stone and since I don't think I have ever come at any forum member on any forum critically or impolitely even if I was correcting some misinformation that I thought was important not to get wrong.
So I'm always a really nice guy and go out of my way to help people on the street even though I'm critical as hell of society in general but when someone starts off with a nasty combative tone, I find it very hard to control myself or go the other way.