gunsmithing, guns, generalLots of options available:
highroad weaponeer homegunsmith garagegunsmithing ar15 reddit/r/guns
None of them have precisely the stack exchange format, which to me means more chaff, less wheat. What do you think?
wherever else
Maybe the firearms.SE.com archives... This is such a shame. My complaints are hollow, since i didn't contribute until now. Are the Q&As here available now or will it take a while? The area51 proposal has no download link that i can see.
I don’t know what it is about non-computer topic forums. There are comp. usenet forums over 30 years old, they don’t die due to lack of use. It’s a “channel” issue in IMHO, many users in this field are accustomed to the forum board posting style. Even though you’re clicking through pages and pages to read a thread, you can’t reply using email, or even quote a poster without additional effort.
The reason this site failed is that it wasn’t aggressively marketed to those established channels or advertised that it even existed. If you don’t set out to create and sustain a community, it’s success becomes the luck of the draw, and it appears that we’re out of luck. Great, now firearms knowledge can fall back into obscurity where I need to find that “guy” who’s a walking encyclopedia but can’t be bothered to write any of it down.
This doesn’t have to be the end, we could re-group, start developing a marketing campaign (blog, twitter, facebook, etc) and revitalize the community. I just can’t do the forum format, it’s a waste of time, extra login/passwords (I have 23). Overall I’m pretty shocked at the news, I didn’t even know that this was a problem.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.