warning - long post
I think there are only a handful of people really that are building rock crawlers out of rovers that actually live up to the promise of the board, and many of them have left the building now for some time. What we have left is a pool of folks who are more into trails and not so much rock crawling, which puts the implied meaning of PBB and the general flavor of the forum at odds.
A lot of the flaming was an effort to keep out the riff-raff to retain or otherwise attract the more hardcore folks who are innovating on the rover platform and have something to share and that the rest of us could learn from. now that many of them don't post much anymore, the LR forum doesn't have much in the way of a direction or theme, certainly none that strongly distinguishes it from other rover forums, other than being abusive.
as far as newbies go, I think the demographic of most of them
puts the means in their hands to common upgrades via bolt-ons from vendors rather than looking for ways to fabricate or otherwise bastardize some other non-standard part for the same job. This creates a special challenge for the forum. the same could be said for the croozer board I guess, but we all know they're :rainbow: and that this is tolerable under the right circumstances over there :flipoff2: :flipoff2: :flipoff2: (just kiddin' guys

)
I'd like to see more general tech getting posted up that's initiated by the DIY'er who has chosen to fabricate something rather than bolt-on, even if it's a bit repetitive. We don't boast the breadth of experience in fabrication engineers and other people with technical background that the other forums do, but folks do tend to want to do things for themselves here.
What distinguishes pirate is the tendency to innovate with something new or experimental over bolting on what is percieved to be the best upgrade for some component. If folks aren't experimenting with variations on a theme, the board's going to just be stale. This process is needed to beget conversation that puts into question what the best value is for upgrading specific components for those who have more of a "wait and see" attitude, which i think is healthy. In short, it separates the wheat from the chaffe. the toy diff threads are a great example of this process.
There is a trend here where we're attracting more folks who have heavily modified vehicles and are more into the rover-esque theme of doing more with less. What I liked about the rover in the first place was that I could run trails with comparitively smaller tires than most yota's were running on the same venues. 33's and lockers are seeming to be a pretty adequate upgrade for me, even though this is barely wheelable in the eyes of most PBB'ers. we don't have but maybe 3-4 spots in all of WA state that could be considered rock-crawling areas, so I've leaned towards having a well rounded rig for trails. I feel there are a lot of folks in this boat that get kind of turned off of PBB but are, none-the-less, capable of posting up good content. If the only active members here are the hardcore rock-crawlers, membership and content is going to be low, and most of the web traffic would just be lurkers trying to avoid work. that isn't community - it's a 4x4 porn site. sure porn is good in small quantities to stimulate ideas, but the daily realities for most of us preclude this as a lifestyle :flipoff2:
We're fortunate to have rover mechanics on the board here that like to wheel and modify stuff for both clients and themselves. And the folks with engineering backgrounds that are here are very active in the rover community - as both individuals and vendors. All of these folks are a great asset to the board, and they'd be sorely missed if they stopped posting.
As for our "friend" from Florida, his posts have made me realize that perhaps those folks are a juuuuust a little different. I find
this link to be very helpful with that issue.
cheers,
-isaac