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I was thinking that a good article for this site would be to put together a list of reviews from people on this site who use different commercial hammocks. There could be one for each model offered where as many people that wanted to could add their review to. This could make it easy for someone looking to buy a hammock to compare.
Any thoughts?
COOL idea. I guess this forum is aspiring to be a centralised place for hammock discussion, and thus information. What about the like of BGT?
is this niche already filled? if it is, can we fill it better anyway?
I like this idea in principle, my practical side needs convincing. :)
other non-hammock forums do this kind of stuff well.
titanium_hiker
sounds like a good idea to me. ...tim
Could you explain more about this. I am not a member of BGT or any other of those forums. I would love to join but to be honest I do not have to time with maintaining three web sites. If someone could explain how it works I can look into this.
I am not sure with how BGT works. Jeff would know more on that. I think it works by people submitting reviews on the gear that they already use. After that they request to test gear from BGT. The BGT test people read people's request to test the gear, then choose people to test it. They get to keep the gear for payment on posting their reviews.
I was thinking about an easy way to do this. The best thing I came up with is starting a thread for each hammock model. People could post their review on the thread. Someone could go through the thread and combine the posts into a final article for the site.
If you want, I have some extra time until March and can take the lead on this if everyone wants to do it. I was just thinking that this would be one more thing to offer to the beginning hammocker that isn't in one place yet.
I think it would be better than the manufactor's sites b/c they would be more unbaised and from other HF members. I think it would be at least in terms of this forum better than BGT b/c it would be easier to ask questions and get answers from the people posting reviews.
The only drawback I see is maintaining quality of the reviews. We have the section for each hammock manufacturer now and anyone is free to post their review in that. If we have a section dedicated to reviews, I'd want them to be high quality - to maintain fairness to the manufacturers, we'd have to make sure there are no unfounded assertions, unsupported opinions, etc. Believe it or not, that takes a lot of time and a fair amount of skill for the BGT editors...and for the writers. That's why many folks drop out of BGT, and why BGT is such a high-quality organization. It's more about the review than about the people. This forum is more about the people, and having freedom to explore and ask and brainstorm and offer opinions, etc.
I'm kind of ambivalent on it, really. It would be nice to have everything consolidated here, but if we do it right then it's also a much bigger project than just asking a few folks to write up their favorite hammock. I'm sure we can get some volunteers with BGT experience to be editors, though.
And we don't have any free gear to offer for reviews. :D
jeff did you say you had some free gear to test o no you said you didn't hehehehe:o
Depends on what you mean by free. If free means you wanna buy it, then maybe... :D
perhaps we could encourage people to adapt to the existing system, ie, posting reviews in the existing manufacturer's sub forums. (sticky them if they're good?)
titanium_hiker
maybe at least one option that could be easily inserted here would be direct links to hammock gear reviews at bgt.