Hello everybody!
I finally registered to this board and this is my first posting here!
Thanks to (me old friend
Rachel for inviting me to do so.
I have not been active in the smurf comunity for about 2 years now. To be honest, I lost my interest in smurf collecting a bit, because after my collection was more or less complete, there was not much new to discover in the smurf world. Plus I was (and still I am) very busy in my job and with my family, so I don't have much spare time left to do any more homemade smurfs or update my website or ... write stuff in a smurfy bulleting board ...
This brings me back to the topic of this tread. The announcement that "both German forums" are shut down now. To be honest I did not even know that there also was a second one
The board that I originally started is the "Ultimative Schlumpfforum".
I have to admit, I was never really happy with it, because it did not turn out as I planned. Back in 2003 my idea was to make a common bulletin board for all German smurf collectors homepages. By that time it was about 10 German homepages and 8 of them agreed that we should all start this board together. The idea was to have a place where you can ask DIFFICULT questions about smurfs and you get an answer from other collectors with a lot of experience in smurf collecting. But as it turned out only me and 2 other collectors (with homepages) were active on this board. Apparently a lot of people were reading the board, but only very few were writing something there. I war quite dissapointed with the German smurf collectors. Apparently they love to keep their knowledge to themselves and don't let anybody else know what they know.
Also I never figured out what you can do against too much arguing on the board. I did not want "censorship" because I thought that it would only help the fake sellers on Ebay, if I delete too much. But I know that the unfriendly tone offended some.
So in the last 2 years I did not post on the board myself. I only deleted Spam, and more Spam, and even more Spam .... SPAM, SPAM, SPAM (reminds me about a Monty Python song)
... well anyway. I decided to close the board. Because I found it useless. But in the last couple of days a receives some e-mails from people asking me to open it again. I have no idea what they expect from this board, and why they even bother ... but anyway ... I just opened it again and changed the setting that only registred members can post there. That may keep spammers away.
But I don't really think that this change the old problem that nobody writes about any interesting stuff there. So I think that in the future, if I find the time I will read what's new on this board and post here every now and then. This board is much better than mine and I guess the main reason is that here we have people behind who devote a lot of their time to the board and are very active. I guess that makes the difference.
Keep up the good work!
Well ... I guess I should finish this posting now. Hello to everybody who is still here and reads my posting to the end without falling asleep
Maureen 
)
