Lowering The Interest Rate

I think Kimi should be blamed for this. Oh no no, I meant Alonso. Hey, let's make a poll and see which one is to blame!

You are right Russ, TF1 has lost its focus, now it seems like a gathering place for the teenager's fan club of Kimi or Alonso or the flavor of the week. The amount of non F1 related topics don't bother me as much as I usually enjoy joking around. But I miss reading good threads about F1 there (Mike's one about understeering and oversteering being a rare exception). As a total ignoramus in the more technical bits of F1, I miss when I actually learned something new everytime I read a thread.
The solution, I think, is not to let oneself to get  too involved with the kiddie's brawlings and try to improve the level of the forum. It will certainly start making me think about something interesting to post, the next time!

Thank you for the compliment, Andres. Russ, I think we should re-double our efforts to start meaningful topics. I like your Toyota/Red Bull/Spyker contribution. Very thought-provoking.

I agree with Andres that if we ignore the constant bickering over what driver is better, those threads may die out.

It is certainly getting boring in the forums lately...so much so that I've taken on a discussion with Cav about Churchill....egads, how bored must I be???

Guilty as charged too... I've not posted much about F1 recently, but generally because if you put an opinion forward you know how it is going to end up..

However I will start a new Driver Market topic for the new season seeing as rumours are flying around already, hopefully it'll get some non argumentative F1 talk going.

Yeah I also haven't posted about F1 so much recently, I must admit.  Must try to do better...

I miss Senna and Dan because they always stirred up debate about F1, in an intelligent and enlightening way.  In their absence, your good selves (and several others) must take up the baton!

I have tried and failed. All the forum kids seem concerned with are endless arguments about Alonso and Kimi. Anything else seems to just die a quick death. There's always Cav to argue politics with, but he's a little crazy and arguing with crazy people loses it's novelty after a while. I fear I may start searching for greener pastures soon.

I'm a little surprised (pleasantly) by the responses to this entry because I thought I may be the only one thinking this way. I wrote the entry a few weeks ago but adopted a wait and see attitude to see if things improved before I posted it. They didn't. The older I get the less tolerant I become, and the less tolerant I become the less I want to engage with the immature shouting and bleating of children. Harsh? I think not.

I agree with what you say, although in fairness, I've looked at some other forums recently (on F1 and other things) and was very disappointed.  I think the signal-to-noise ratio (to quote someone, probably) is much better here than most other forums.  Then again, perhaps I didn't search hard enough...

Another thought is that instant messaging is a good way to talk to those you like.  Several members of the forum use it already.

I'd rather don't see you guys leave. I wish I could rise the level of the forum, but I am painfully aware of my lack of knowledge to propose any interesting topic. Yet, I hope that the friendship we have in here is strong enough not to let you wander too far away!
I lurked a few times around Technical F1, but let's be honest: do they have a Steve? A Ykick? A Bruce? A Ben? Not to mention people like you guys but I guess you are not looking for your mirror images

Well, I will not desert this forum altogether, but I will be a-searching for something better. Andres, you are very humble and that's good. It enables the rest of us to grab you and push you up with the great posters where you belong! There are many good posters here, but maybe the season itself is contributing to the malaise around here. I enjoy the races, but there's not much spectacular to be discussing. The good drivers are plugging along at the front and thanks to the Almighty Downforce, we see no spectacular, a$$-hanging-out, tyre-to-tyre moments. Also, these long breaks between races get tedious to endure. GP's used to be predictable, every fortnight we could enjoy some racing. Now even that small comfort is gone. Ah well....

Don't canonize me yet!
Seriously, I am not being humble, it's the truth! But you are right about the season, I was thinking about that too. Races themselves get more boring each year, and during this particular interlude there is NOTHING of note happening in F1! We have to settle for the stupid Spyker vs SA/STR controversy, no more epic fights amongst teams and teammates, no interesting races, not even a single scandal to shake us up! To think that after this one month interlude all we are gonna get is another boring race at Spain is kinda depressing

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. I don't take much trouble with posts, because I know I'll get the same juvenile responses in any case. As far as searching for greener pastures goes, there aren't any, I am probably the person who has searched more than anyone else. It's funny to go to the atlas forums for example - the same problems, and people complaiing about the same decline in forum quality, except for the fact that it happens on a larger scale. I think it's the sport, with Michael gone, we were robbed of a giant rivalry, the replacements are a feeble lot. One annoying thing is my overpriced internet connection, which doesn't let me watch youtube videos as much as I like, which means I have to stay out of Mike's threads.

I'll cut down on posting those vids, then. Cav, you and I will always argue about everything, but I do enjoy reading your posts. I tried ignoring you once but I was always too curious to read what you have to say to really make the ignore work properly. If you're going to start posting more in the F1 sections of the forum, I'll certainly stick around to read those posts. Your point about Mikey being gone is valid, I think.

Fwiw, I don't think this problem is new here either.  I remember plenty of, in my less than humble opinion, daft posts ever since I joined.  But the ratio of good posts to bad is relatively high here, compared to other places*, thanks to all the posters in this thread, and Steve, Ykick, Bruce, Paul etc etc.  I think one change in this forum is that it's gotten bigger and some of the better posters only post on very specific things.  Perhaps we could encourage them to post more often.  I will also try to do better.  Also we lost some of the best posters of the past like Senna, Dan, Shaun etc - and of course we all know they were all as critical of the old standard of posting as we are now!  [And btw I'm pretty sure that most of them have simply stopped posting much on the internet, rather than going elsewhere.]  One other suggestion, along with instant messaging, we could make better use of the blogs (and eg the technical/historical subforums) as an area where only the most committed members venture.

*There are places that are unimaginably bad - until you experience the full horror.

When i saw this topic, i thought it was about interest rates probably in england, and i thought i could show off my economics skills but nahh...it was on a totally different topic...