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Archery Message Boards and Use Groups
Message boards are places where on-line discussions take place. They are
organized as a list of topics (sometimes called threads) and are usually created
by message board members. One great feature of message boards is the ability to
search for key words. For example, I searched the Archery Network board for all
topics with the words "back tension" in them and found 91 topics listed. That's
several hundred individual messages! Of course the information is only going to
be as good as the source providing it and the beauty of these message boards is
that professional archers and top level amateurs regularly take part in the
discussions. Here is a look at some of the most popular archery message boardst.
PSE Archery Forums (
www.pse-archery.com)
PSE's message board includes areas for Bow Hunting, General Archery Questions,
and Tech Talk, to name a few. To find these follow the "message board" link from
the PSE main page. PSE Archery Forum is well laid out and easy to use. I have
found that it does have technical problems from time to time, so if you have
difficulty logging in, be patient and try again in a few days. Overall, this
message board has the feeling of a close knit family. I get the impression most
of the regulars know each other very well. Not surprisingly, the regulars
(mostly PSE staff shooters) have a strong bias towards PSE equipment. I have
found excellent information on this board about form and tuning. To post
messages you must register and become a member, though anyone can read the
messages.
Easton Forums (
www.eastonarchery.com)
Easton has a message board called Tech Talk 2. This is the successor to the Tech
Talk 1 board which is no longer active. To locate this board follow the "tech
room" link on Easton's main page. The original Tech Talk message board had over
6000 messages and was very informative. The new message board, Tech Talk 2, is
well underway, but it will take time to build the body of collective knowledge
the old one contained. Currently Easton has a bowhunting board and an equipment
and tuning board. I have found excellent information here.
Archery-Information Network (www.archeryinfonet.com
)
Archery-Information Network is a great Internet message board. It is a complete
center for archery and bowhunting resources. Although the home page makes the
site look hunting oriented, most of the information is target oriented. Posting
messages is quick and painless. It contains several message boards, a classified
section, and an event calendar. Message board categories include general target
archery, bow hunting, women's archery, traditional, and others. Most of the
discussions come from hard core tournament archers (3-D and marked yardage). The
discussions seem very well balanced with few "personal agendas".
Bob Ragsdale (
http://domino.htcomp.net/ragsdale.nsf)
While it's not strictly a message board, this site can be very useful. Bob
Ragsdale's "Compound Bow Tech & Tackle Talk" is a question and answer forum. Bob
worked for PSE as an Archery Engineer for many years and is very knowledgeable
on the subject of compound bows. Bob's site is organized as a collection of
questions and answers. For older messages, the formatting of the text is
difficult to read, but if you bear with this you will find excellent
information.
Some of the categories Bob covers are-"Arrow Spine and Arrows," "Bow Setup
(Tuning)," and "Compound Bow Functioning - Myths Dispelled." Also try "Robert's
10 Rules of Archery." The search engine provided at the site does a good job of
searching for answers to a specific question. The questions Bob feels are most
important he labels with "Must Read." Searching on "Must Read" highlights all
these questions.
Sagittarius Archery Blackboard and Website
http://www.student.utwente.nl/~sagi/
Sagittarius Twente is a recurve archery
club in the Netherlands. The club's web page has interesting articles (see
"Selected Archery Articles") and an extensive message board they call the
"Archery Blackboard." However, the focus of the message board is Olympic style
recurve archery.
Archery Clubs and Communities
MSN (Microsoft Network,
www.msn.com ) and Yahoo (www.yahoo.com
) offer clubs or communities specifically for archers. These are set up by
fellow archers and are free to join. First you must become a registered user
(currently free of charge) with MSN or Yahoo.
In MSN Communities there about 70 archery related MSN communities
(May 2002). Many of these aren't very active, with little or no content. A few
that are interesting are ArcheryAmerica (http://communities.msn.com/ArcheryAmerica), which has around 500 members, and TargetArcher. A list of all
MSN archery communities can be found by going to the MSN communities home area
(http://communities.msn.com/home) and entering "archery" in the community search
engine.
Yahoo Archery Clubs is a list of archery related Yahoo clubs can be found
at
http:// groups.yahoo.com and entering archery in the search window. The
clubs tend to be specialized, e.g. Primitive Archery (one of the more active),
Archery in the UK, Barebow style, etc. Most of these clubs have 100 messages or
fewer with a few messages being posted every week. As of May 2002 there were 187
clubs listed, including Skookum Archers.
Alt.Archery, The Original Internet Archery Message Board
Before the widespread use of the World Wide Web, newsgroups were very popular
and acted as basic message boards. They still are very popular but don't have
the slick graphical interface that modern message boards have. Three newsgroups
cater to the interest of archers: alt.archery, alt.archery.traditional, and
rec.sport.archery. Of these, alt.archery is the most popular. A good way to see
these is to use the search engine Google (www.google.com).
Simply go to Google and select "groups" from the main page. Then enter the name
of the group in the search window. Currently, alt.archery has 33,000 messages
dating from 1995 to the present. One word of caution: the newsgroups are not
moderated as the other message boards are. Anybody is free to post any kind of
message they want. This is definitely not an area of the Internet for children
to be exploring without adult supervision.
New sites are coming and going. In addition,
www.archeryinfonet.com is undergoing some changes and is spinning off a new
site
www.archeryinfonet.com/cgi-bin/ultimate/ultimatebb.cgi. I guess this goes to
show the only constant in the world of archery is change!
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