Oh, it's been a few months...time to take the dead horse out and start beating it.

Seriously, if I were a first-time poster, and I came to see this thread, why on earth would I want to post on this forum? Right off the bat, it makes us (or at least some of us) look arrogant and conceited.

I didn't join this site for the Harbour Lights content. Back in December 2002, I wanted to have a place to talk to other lighthouse people about trip planning. I was 12. I wanted to hang out in "The Map Room" and get ideas for trips to drag my parents on. (Now I just go solo, much easier.) My second post, which I don't really need to dig out because I don't really like to read stuff I wrote years ago, said something to that effect.

I have a few Harbour Lights. I bought the CF exclusives and a few society pieces, the Bailey's Harbor Range. Quite frankly, the other day I was cleaning my room, and I put them all back in the boxes. I'm trying to sell all but one piece, my Sea Girt, which I have arranged to donate to the permanent collection at the Sea Girt Lighthouse.

So I'm trying to get rid of a couple pieces of sculpture that, quite frankly, I see as excess at this point in my life. Putting aside the fact that I can't move these "rare" pieces for my life...I still have no intent of leaving this site.

Why?

Because over eight years, this place has become a family to me. And it's because it's a social place. There's a really amazing dynamic here that has lasted for a really long time. I have met people who I have talked to on the CF for years face-to-face only once, but that one time we picked up immediately as if we'd known each other forever. Because we have. It's a really, really special forum, and I don't see this kind of thing on other sites I'm on.

Does it MATTER whether we talk "enough" about Harbour Lights sculptures? Let's face it...it's 2010. The golden days of HL are long gone, and quite frankly, talking to people from outside these virtual circles, there's more discussion on "when are they going under" than anything else. I hate to be harsh, but from what I've seen in the general lighthouse world, Harbour Lights are on their way to irrelevancy.

The fact that this forum is not solely reliant on the discussion of Harbour Lights is the reason it has not become irrelevant. I come here, even though I don't have much interest in HLs anymore and I can talk to many of these people on Facebook, because this site has a DYNAMIC. That's worth a few minutes out of my day to devote to it.

Do I find stuff boring? Yep. I call it "the top half of the page." That's me. But the bottom half, the "bricks and mortar" stuff and the "social forums" stuff are why I come.

I hate to be blunt, and perhaps a bit of a jerk, but I'm getting really sick of these preachy posts coming up every few months about how "things aren't the same anymore." Nope, they aren't. Things change over the course of fifteen years or so. The Collector Forums are a totally user-driven community, totally at the mercy of the whole body of membership. Maybe the users are driving it away from the bits of resin and into the bits of bricks-and-mortar.

So thus it's irrelevant now?

Show me another lighthouse forum that still has the kind of activity this one has on any level. The only other contender there ever was has become a ghost town. If this type of attitude continues to prevail on the Collector Forums, we'll be next.

Oh, and I seriously wonder how many more members would post if they weren't welcomed with a lengthy and blunt sales pitch for Wisconsin Point...