[NDhunter]

I see the banner, announcing 10 years of Birdforum.

Happy Anniversary. Keep up the good work.

Jerry

[ronh]

I'll second that! Thanks to the folks who came up with this idea, and make it happen.
Ron

[davercox]

Yes indeed, well done Steve and your colleagues. Here's to the next ten !

[Troubador]

Happy Birthday and Many Happy Returns :-)
Lee

[Sandra (Taylor)]

I'm so glad that I found this site all those years ago - through a small item in Bird Watching magazine. I've made some good friends through the site - they will be life-long friends.

Thank you to all who watch over it daily


Sandra

[northernloon]

As Sandra has said above I'm so glad I stumbled upon this site when I got back into birding. Not only have I made some good friends I've also added 12 lifers to my British list. Result!

Thank you to all the squirrels working behind the screen to make it happen.

[FrankD]

Happy anniversary. Thank you for providing this excellent forum for discussion.

[Chosun Juan]

Yes - congratulations! .... and well done BF crew

Keep up the good work - a wonderful community


Chosun

[ceasar]

Congratulations! Here's looking at 10 more great years!

Bob

[Keith Dickinson]

I'll add my congrats to the list. I've made some firm friends via the site as well as learning a hell of a lot. Thanks Steve, Andy and Ollie plus all the others who we don't ever see.

[keith]

Thanks to the bf team from me also, it's a fantastic site, a great concept, I check it out most days, well done everybody involved.

[Kevin Conville]

Indeed, congratulations!

BF is an excellent site, well managed. Thank you.

[mooreorless]

Congratulations BirdForum!

[stereotruckdriver]

Count me in for a big Thanks Birdforum!!! Bryce...

[marinemaster]

Great forum, great people, great knowledge and experience sharing.
Now only if Swaro would donate to celebrate some 8x32 SV.....that would make it perfect :)

[James Bean]

A world-wide website and friendly forum for everything to do with birds, nicely done...
Thank you!

[newfie ghost]

The place to discuss glass. Happy 10!

[Swissboy]

Congratulations and a BIG Thank You to all involved to keep this site working so well. It's great to be able to read it even as a guest, and to be able to fully use it without a financial contribution.
Nevertheless, I hope you get some more contributions from users so that we can all continue to benefit from the relatively unobtrusive way the advertisements are placed here.

I should say that I have saved a fair amount thanks to the fine advice I got here.

[brocknroller]

Is BF's anniversary being covered in the media or at least in some birding magazines? Should be. It's a big deal.

Perhaps interviews with Steve and his Gang on how he/they came up with the idea, how the site has grown into the "world's largest birding forum," and how it's helped promote birding worldwide.

Well, perhaps some personal reminiscence by members on this thread about what BF has meant to them will help inspire some media attention.

Until I saw the banner, I didn't know when BF was founded or that I practically got in on the ground floor in 2003.

I followed some Cloudy Night members over from the subforum "Cloudy Days," which was originally about optics for daytime use, but eventually degenerated into Major Chaos and General Tomfoolery with off-topic threads such as "Just Bridges" and "Just Cows".

Then the forum was merged with the microscopy forum, and that was when I jumped ship. All those pix of amoebas and paramecium gyrating and dividing really freaked me out.

Having gotten so used to the "off topic" nature of the Cloudy Days forum (now CN has an actual off-topic forum called "Off Topic Observatory"), when I first came to BF I had trouble staying on topic (not that this is a problem any longer :-), and got some static about that, which is putting it mildly.

What I found on the BF binocular forums were a bunch of guys, mostly, I was hoping for more females, but in hindsight, I should have signed up for the Martha Stewart forum. :-) Women tend to keep men civilized as I learned when I moved from an all-male Animal House to a co-ed dorm at college.

Guys who had a passion for binoculars. Or should I say "fetish"? Like CN's bin forum, there was the Big Professor, over here, it's Henry. The experts, the collectors, the dilettantes, the snobs, the noobs, and the boobs -- the usual roundup of personality types you find on any "shop talk" forum, from cars to guitars to telescopes.

What was unique about BF is the Ignore List (there is also the "Buddy List," but I'm not sure what that does). So if somebody irked you or your liver, you could block his posts from view. What a wonderful idea. A Special Uncle Tonoose No Prize to its inventor and for Steve for making it a feature on BF. If not for that feature, everybody would have to endure my verbosity. :-)

Speaking of which, mooreorless's ADD is probably kicking in about now, so I'll wrap this up.

I wanted to thank, not just Steve and the moderators and code jockeys behind the cyber curtain who make these forums a pleasant place to engage in discourse about birding and birding optics, day in, day out, but also all the regular and irregular contributors to the binoculars forums (for the latter, try Activia), without whom I'd be less knowledgeable about optics, have nothing to argue about, and would probably have gotten my PhD for all the time I've spent reading their posts and posting replies. Well, a PhD in Hermeneutics probably wouldn't have gotten me very far anyway.

Congratulations! to 10 years of birding conversations on these forums by birders all over the world.

Here's to the next 10 years of alpha companies trying to make a roof as good as the SE and EII.

Brock

[mooreorless]

Brock I noticed you kept this short and to the point

I would like to say thanks to "Blue" Steve, Andy Bright, Green Fields and all the Moderators! Also all the great people that post with thoughts, pictures, artwork etc.