Since the thread has been hijacked already, I shall cut in here as well.
First, thanks to you and your fellow old hands for providing the forum. It is excellent. However...
When I switched from DE shaving to straights, I first came to B&B. They site is better optimised for search engines, and they have this seemingly wonderful illustrated tutorial for beginners. In hindsight, that set me back by about two months, but life is a bitch.
Now then, SRP has undoubtedly the most knowledge anywhere on the web. But it is utterly dis-organised. Coming back to Bruno's point about vocal multi-posters: A lot of time and effort here is spent re-iterating what has been said many times before. That may be a design decision, but it will not further the cause of this forum.
Why? Because the regulars (as you may want to call the experienced users with lots of postings) have reached a level of experience that cannot be reached other than by several years of experience in dealing with all aspects of straight shaving, honing in particular.
That may also explain the exit factor. For an average visitor to this forum, a few months will suffice to gather the knowledge necessary to obtain satisfactory shaves. They may even decide to keep sending off their dulled razors to a honemeister, rather than spend time and money buying hones and learning the skill. I decided to learn to hone my own razors, but the money factor was considerable (again, many thanks to Joe, Simon and Ivan for their tremendous support), and I have only begun to learn the skill.
Coming back to knowledge management (and at the end of the day, that is what this discussion will boil down to, like it or not):
- Forums are excellent for a quick exchange of information. They are bad for presenting existing knowledge.
- Wikis are good for aggregating, and refining, knowledge.
- IRC (aka "The Chat") is good for communication and exchanging ideas.
Courtesy of Dave's excellent, and outstanding, work here, all three options are available. Unfortunately, though, only the forum is used to its full extent, and beyond. The result is that a lot of energy is spent paraphrasing known truths (not least because newcomers are not offered a quick and dirty way to straight shaving other than your DVD (which is, of course, phenomenal, but takes some time to arrive in a beginner's inbox).
Interestingly, there recently was a discusssion on
#srp whether pointing people towards
the Wiki would result in a decrease of "familiarity" in the forums. Personally, I do not believe that will be the case. But it will mean a certain change in the tone of the forum. Whether that is condecension, as another poster in this thread suggested, is entirely up to the recipient of the message. I come from a Unix background, where
RTFM has always been considered a perfectly acceptable response to a stupid question. And yes, I believe that any question that can be answered by
google is inherently stupid, because it is a waste of resources (point in case: writing time available to SRP regulars).
Now then, where was I? Ah yes, the Wiki issue. The next logical step for SRP would be to turn that well of wisdom that the forum is into an easily accessible encyclopedia of straight razor shaving. The Wiki has been online for several months. Has anything happened? Not at all. If it were not for a few heroic characters like Bjørn or Lee, it would still be devoid of any meaningful content.
And that is exactly where the problem lies. You guys can spend months and years discussing the advantages of a Coticule with slurry over the other latest honing hype, but it will simply not make any difference whatsoever to the outside world. You are, in a manner of speaking, the earth lovers of shaving. Your problems are becoming as esoteric as your solutions. But you are losing contact with beginners in a way that will effectively cut you off from the personnel resources required to take this site beyond what it currently is. You will need more writers, and editors in particular, if you want to achieve that. And neither The Conversation, nor the umptienth gun thread, nor another discussion on whether barbers were better in the Middle Ages, the Wild West, or when Lynn Abrams was young (whichever happened first) will help attract that target group to this forum.
Did I mention that I totally love this place? If not, I do. Despite the above paragraphs.