Thanks to this forum, I have gotten more and more into hammock camping and now DIY projects, and it has been great. However, I sometimes find myself reinventing the wheel or making mistakes that I later discover had been talked about in some thread I hadn't seen. There is an amazing amount of knowledge and information here, but there is so much activity that sorting through it could take a very long time. Stickies help, but even reading all of the 47 stickies is a pretty hefty time commitment. Some threads, like the mini-spreader bar thread, could literally take hours to read through, only to find that many people eventually gave up on the idea for various reasons or for particular purposes – and sometimes you don't find out what all the participants concluded or why.

My thought is that it would be tremendously helpful to have the "elders" of the forum – i.e., experienced, knowledgeable, skilled members – give hammockbiographies. This would be their story of hammock exploration. The emphasis would be on what they have tried (buying, making, techniques, etc.), what worked for them or didn't and why, what they settled on for the present, etc. It might include relevant personal info, for example: "I moved into a tiny apartment and decided to sleep in a hammock to save space, and these were the things I learned/developed as a result. Later I got into ultralight backpacking, and these were the things I learned/developed that did or didn't apply from my apartment hammock". Reasons for (for example) moving from bridge hammock to gathered-end (or vice-versa) could be widely applicable or very person-specific, and the hammockbiography could help differentiate them. "As I gained/lost weight, got older, developed a medical condition, etc. this became more comfortable or more practical than that."

For active forum elders, their hammockbiography might be like a high-level summary of their forum postings over the years, but hopefully with some context and perspective about what they were doing and thinking at the time and the eventual outcome.

And it would be awesome if the final section of the hammockbiography was a list of things that the elder now knows (or believes) that they wish they had known sooner, the setup they settled on (for now?), and what they are still wanting/trying/dissatisfied with.

I can imagine a hammockbiography being a few lines or "War and Peace"-sized; that, of course, would be up to the elder writing it.