Anybody who used to be a member years ago still out there?

[Niner]

Welcome back. There used to be lots of enthusiast message boards. We who have been in this internet hobby stream for a couple decades have witnessed milsurp sites all along the internet highway vanish over time because of no customers or because of site providers commercialized their hold on the sites to the point of sucking the life out of them and driving people off.

Enthusiasm has been dampened down to a flicker with the lack of supply. However, there is still interest out there. The game has just changed. The new enthusiast must be a different breed of cat than the original three for a hundred Nagant people early on. He won't have as many guns and the guns he buys will cost many times what we paid for them. The Bubba VS Purist alignment has gone away and won't be frequent topic and is a bright spot. The new collectors way of collecting them won't be as easy as sending Century a copy of your C&R, placing an order and having the old war relic arrive at your door either. Many states and the federal government are making even owning milsurps a difficult proposition and the ranks of the C&R licensed collector seem to be shrinking fast.

Another thing about the internet connections demise is that free standing websites, like this one, are down to the very few and it is difficult, maybe impossible, to find any new ones that have been made in the last half dozen years. The predator easy site producers like Easy Board which this site and Parallax used in the beginning, gave rise to a half dozen or more milsurp oriented sites. However, Easyboard squeezed users for money then crashed and came back as Tapatalk .......something even worse.... which Parallax fell prey to in the declining years.

The one really good outcome of this site crashing under Easyboard, way back when, was that my son, a computer programmer/engineer showed me the way and this site isn't owned by anyone but me. It's on a server that only my son controls. There are no advertisements. There are no appeals for send me money or we are going to hell. It can exist in space uncontrolled by the kind of people that censor social media corporate platforms. No one can tell me what can or can not be posted here or what political or what social opinion must be removed or modified out of wokeness or politically mandated correctness.

We get new user registrations every week. None of them are saying anything...but they do have to pass the capture questions so they are probably instigated by "real" people. The "NSA"... the National Spy Agency? I mean the "SECURITY" agency, looking to see if they can find out what is being said here looking for potential domestic terrorists? Probably not even them for long, considering the range of public connection to this site is minimal to say the least.

It would be good to see some activity here besides the handful of us who do post things. However, the site will go on a while longer...... just because it can... if for no other reason.

[Niner Delta]

I still check in almost every day, and sometimes even try to post something. Not much going on with guns,
it's been almost 4 years since I have gone out shooting ...
Now that it's winter, won't go out until spring for sure. Every once in while I'll grab a couple of guns and go out to
the shop and clean and oil them, just to have a gun in my hands, I miss that. Probably most haven't been touched
since the last time I cleaned them.
It seems that all the guns, C&R or modern are worth a lot more than we paid for them years ago. Sometimes I think
maybe I should just sell them before they are totally banned and you can't sell guns at all. Sadly, that may come
to pass in the future, who knows what will happen? But I won't ever do that, so my son will have to deal with them someday.
The only guns I have bought in the last few years are that oddball 1871 Uruguay Mauser and a short SKS Chinese Paratrooper
model. The Mauser is a wall hanger as there is on ammo for it and haven't shot the SKS either, maybe next spring. ...


.

[rice paddy daddy]

I'm still kicking at age 76.
I was away for a while after I retired and no longer surfed the web at my desk on the clock.

[Niner Delta]

rice paddy daddy...
Me too, same age as you and still kicking around. I had to look up where the 5th Div was in Nam and you were up
close to the DMZ in I Corp. I think you guys had forests and mountains and actual dirt for your tracks.
Robert and I were all the way at the other end down in the Mekong Delta with mud and swamps.
Good to see some posting here, welcome back. ...

.

[Niner]

Rice Paddy Daddy, good to see someone make a visit that was here in the more, lot more, active days. Unlike Niner Delta I spent the last three months of my Vietnam adventure with the 101st up North around Hue and the A shau South and West of Hue.

[rice paddy daddy]

Only one brigade of the 5th went to Vietnam.
We were on loan to the Marine Corps and came under command and control of the 3rd Marine Division. We mainly operated along the DMZ from Khe Sahn to the South China Sea.
The ARVN's took care of the southern parts of Quang Tri Province.
I was in a support battalion and spent my year inside the wire at Quang Tri Combat Base.
Quang Tri was a dangerous area. There were no VC, it was all NVA regulars.