What open discussion did for me
 

As I said in another post, we had a nice community here, once.

This site is about Mercedes technical matters. Even if OD was out of hand or anything, 99% of us got to know each other better and bonded more because of it. That in turn made us more friendly and helpful to each other when it came to the technical stuff.

Now however, I do not know who 'mikemover' is nor do i really care to waste my time looking things up and posting diagrams to someone who's just a name on a screen. However, when the Open Discussion forum was around I learnt that he's a drummer for a band, toured America somewhat, crashed a van, and had some great photos ;). I bought his CDs. He even sent me a T-shirt. This was a great community.

A British performance car forum I am on has meets in the pub. At these meets they do not talk the whole time about their Porsche/Ferrari/Lotus - that would be boring. They talk about what jobs they do, people they've met, holidays they went on. It's a lovely way to meet up with like-minded people. It's also they only time I'm likely to hold a conversation, on an unprejudiced level plane, with a millionaire Hotel chain owner, or dustbin man.

I have also learnt a lot here about America and Americans and you all sounded great. It encouraged me to come to the US for a short tour 2 years ago.

None of this would have happened without Open Discussion, and life would be much poorer for me. I may not have a Mercedes as my next car, as without the nostalgic chats here and enjoyment of proudly posting pictures of it for everyone's comments, I'm just not so enthusiastic about them. I suppose without the community, it's just another car and I have been fooling myself into thinking it's more than that.

I am very sad for the loss of open discussion here at Mercedesshop.com.
Thankyou for listening to this message, as I do not compelled to visit or post - technical or not - here again. And sorry to the mods who felt they had to close it. I know it must have been a hard decision.


yours from England,

Russ

http://www.knapplane.plus.com/mercdowns.jpg

You're in luck!
 

Tonight we brought Open Discussion back.

Astonishing.. just as I posted this. I am much happier now.

Could you move this to Open Discussion, perhaps so that people can see what it did for us (well, me), and will work to keep it?


Thankyou kindly Bill, for listening to us.

:)
Russ

As the old curse goes . . . be careful of what you wish. ;)