I've been watching this phenomenon as it applies to computer conferencing in general even before there was an Internet. As populations grow, the ratio of noise to high-quality posts goes up. Eventually people leave, and eventually enough people leave that some of the early people may start coming back, but usually they have already found some other place to go that doesn't grow so quickly.
In theory, the ability to divide the forum into many sub-groups and then sub-sub-groups is supposed to help with this problem. You have a place like "general knife discussion" where anything goes so long as it is minimally knife related, and then you have more specific forums that will draw much smaller numbers of people hopefully keeping the discussion quality high among those who are really interested in the narrower topic.
Since the whole of BFC is a resource for buyers and sellers, I don't see how you can say that makers shouldn't come here and post pics. of new knives. Sure it would be great if those makers engaged in discussion also, but in the end, and for them, this has to be a place where their work can be exposed in an effort to expand their market. Otherwise, what would motivate them to come here at all?
I run a "throwing knife" mailing list (actually its about all thrown weapons, but knife discussion predominates). It gets much more traffic than the BFC knife throwing forum because its been around for 6+ years now and it acquired a reputation for being the place to discuss throwing issues before long before BFC came along. I encourage people to "advertise" in the sense that they introduce themselves and give us pointers to what they produce, talk about their products, etc. The only thing I discourage in that regard is periodic advertising (i.e., someone sending the same message to the list every week or month) messages that have no new content.
Finally, those makers who choose not to participate are cutting themselves off from potential new customers. If you want to encourage makers to participate here, then buy the knives of those who do more than those of them who don't. It takes a while, but if makers who don't participate discover that those who do have increased their business 10% or 20%, then they too will come eventually. Of course there are those knife makers who have all the business they need and don't want an increased rate of orders. Nothing wrong with that either. Groups like this have no power to bring makers in that group into the fold. We don't have leverage on everybody, and that too is probably a good thing in its own way...
A.G., I'd like to respond to your question too... There are many many knife makers (and I'm including also representatives of these makers who often are the participants here like Anne Reeve) here who I can not name off the top of my head, but of those who I can name include Bob Dozier, Chris Reeve, Newt Livesay, Ross Aki (now out of business alas), and George Tichbourne. Thanks in great measure to their presence here and what others have said about them, also here on BFC, each one of the above makers has gotten at least one order from me.
[This message has been edited by matthew rapaport (edited 05-11-2001).]
