Re: EF-5 thread too long?
DaveV - I can see where having to scroll through so many messages would be a real pain. It's never been a problem to me, because I use flat mode, so all I have to do is click directly on the last page.
I don't know what would be the best way to handle it. Since I'm in "Other Brands", I don't really want a hundred different threads, because they'll just get lost amongst everything else and nobody will ever see them again. On the other hand, if this thread is too long for people to bother with, they won't look at it anyway.
As for Muhammad creating an EarthForce forum, I'd like that, but there's only one person on TBN with an EarthForce machine, so that certainly doesn't seem to scale well. I predict there will soon be a lot more EarthForce machines out there than there are now for some of the brands that already do have their own forum, though. What I won't predict, however, is that there will be a lot of TBN owners with them, because TBN has (so far) been oriented more to "consumer" or "hobbyist" tractors than "commercial", "industrial" or "professional" tractors. Not that there isn't a lot of overlap, and I certainly don't intend to infer that one is better than the other, just different types of equipment for different usage purposes. So, what to do?
I have seriously considered leaving TBN a number of times because it seemed to me, from the equipment owned by the vast majority of the membership and the uses it's put to, that it didn't warrant the time and effort I put into posting my rambling reports of research, experiences, etc. But every time I think that, somebody (or a dozen somebodies) offer feedback that indicates I'm on the wrong track. Every time I've hinted at it, I've gotten a bunch of public posts and, usually, a bunch more private messages. I appreciate that - it tells me what I needed to know. So, I continue to hang around. I benefit from TBN as much as anybody, but I'm not going to stay here just to ask questions and get info for myself. If it doesn't appear that the contributions I can make are useful to the typical TBN member, I feel honor-bound to go somewhere else, because it's just not right to get more than you give. I believe that's true for all areas of life, not just tractor forums. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif
Which takes me back to where I started - what to do? I would really like to see more "commercial", "industrial", or "professional" membership and participation here on TBN, but I'm not sure how to make that happen. Muhammad already has a Construction Equipment forum, but that's little used. Maybe it's my fault because I put this thread in the "Other Brands" forum instead. My reason at the time was that I thought people who could benefit from considering an EarthForce machine instead of a CUT would look at this forum, while they would tend to ignore the Construction forum. An EarthForce machine isn't a CUT, but there's very little a CUT can do that an EarthFoce machine can't, given the fact that it can take almost any attachment a skid steer can and doesn't tear up the lawn like a skid steer will. Granted, they're not the best machine around for mowing lawns, but who needs TBN to tell them how to mow a lawn? And while we're at it, the guy who buys a "huge" CUT (compared to a riding mower) will end up 9 times out of 10 using it just as much for jobs an EarthForce machine would be a lot better at as he does for mowing grass. So, now which machine would be better for him? Or, looked at another way, he'd be a lot better off with an EarthForce machine and a lawn mower, than beating the CUT to death doing stuff it's not big enough to do, while he beats his lawn to death cutting it with a machine too big to for that. (Ooops, I stepped up on the soap box without intending to, so enough of that.)
Um, I think that still leaves me at, you guessed it, "what to do?" I don't know. As I say, I think I and my EarthForce really belong on a different board more than I do TBN, but I like TBN and the gang here - there's no place else like it. I guess you just wanted me to kill this thread and start another one - you didn't intend to open this can of worms. /w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif Ok, I can do that, I guess. But I'd like to hear what Muhammad and others think, too...
