What I've always liked about this board (I first registered in '03 as "billk") is that everyone, regardless of age, is civil and seems genuinely interested in backpacking and helping others who are also interested. We don't all agree on everything, but that's good...we get fresh perspectives that way. I hope this board continues for that reason, and because it's fun. I wish we could all go backpacking together

There's certainly not as much activity now as before, and that's too bad. Maybe because there are more backpacking forums out there now. I just Googled "backpacking forum" (actually, I DuckDuckGo'ed it) and saw some I've never seen before, as well as ones that have been around a while.

I definitely like the people on this board better. Discourse seems much more civil. I thought when BPL went to pay model new people would flock here. DIY projects on BPL are more extreme and I find that more interesting to my engineering background, but I don't think that is unrelated to the type of discourse they have unfortunately.