Outdoorlife Info

Information is the tool us humans use to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the beings on our planet. How to acquire food, how to make fire, tanning hides and securing a shelter are all important skills needed for survival and to thrive. Before the printed word started about 500 years ago acquiring this knowledge was by word of mouth for most people. So networking has been important for 3 or 4 thousand years and if you were isolated then you were stuck with a life of reinventing the wheel by trial and error.
Ok, enough with the sayings. Now we have the internet, any info at any time, if you have a smart phone with reception. Sometimes searches work great and sometimes you can page thru hundreds of pages and not find what you want. If you have a specific question it gets harder to get an answer close to what you want. You can twit or post on facebook but your status in your inside group of fiends may take a hit. What to do? Enter the world of forums. These are sites geared toward a certain interest.

Computer repair, auto repair, home repair, golf cart repair and swing help, financial repair and advise, tropical fish help, home brewing help, hobby train help, antique collecting help and of course hunting and fishing help are some of the forums I've visited and bookmarked. The best in my opinion is the Michigan-sportsman.com site(don't forget that dash). My profile says I've been a member with the site for 8+ years. I thought it was longer than that and for some forums it is because of problems these sites were having at the onset. Be it software or servers or viruses many of the forums had problems staying together and online. Mi-sports has been head and shoulders above the rest from my experience. This trouble free environment has allowed them to grow exponentially over the years as has the broadening content.

The many categories cover just about any topic and outdoor person could have and many more that cover everyday life. First there's hunting and fishing broken down into type of endeavor and general area to do it in the state( Detroit River being one) totaling over 30 different tabs. Then there's general info ranging from cooking to politics to buying and selling with choices totaling over 60 different tabs. Don't believe what you've heard about the internet that everything is true. There's a lot of false info given out from people wishing to profit. On Mi-sports, however, the info being shared is from everyday people exchanging ideas and what they know for the betterment of each other. Some try to get on a soapbox or pass phony info on but their usually put in their place by more knowledgeable members.

How could this wonder site start, who could have thought of it. A guy named Steve started the site, Steve is all I could get out of him. Steve has a BS in computer and electrical Engineering from Oakland University and an MS in computer engineering from Wayne State University. He used the knowledge from these degrees along with a love of the outdoors to start the site.

"Founded in 1999, Michigan-Sportsman.com started as a collection of links to Michigan related sites, and a series of manually edited blogs. It was a marriage of my passions for the outdoors and computers.

In late 1999 we started our first message board. After going through 3 different message board softwares, we settled on one in late 2000. Photo galleries, classifieds, product reviews were added in later years. It was a social network before the term was coined. Users held self organized get togethers and formed friendships because of the site. Many are have formed long lived friendships with others who share the same interests in the outdoors through the site.

We got booted off many shared servers over the years because our traffic overwhelmed the other sites that were on the server. We got a dedicated server in 2002. The site boomed.

By 2009 we had become Michigan’s first and foremost outdoor website and celebrated 10 years of existence. Today the site regularly gets over 250,000 unique users per month, has almost 4,000,000 user generated posts and regularly sees over 1000 users browsing the site at any given time. I had never envisioned anything close to this from the meager beginning."

Steve now has help from many of his fiends that act as moderators for the tabs. Steve moderates a lot by himself but for the larger most used ones there's up to 4 people watching. There aren't many rules and the fact there are so many different topics precludes any censorship, but there's no profanity or lewd talk and the truth is appreciated. Deviate from the common sense rules and your threads or posts will be eliminated from the database and sent into no man's cyber space. Enjoy this site as much as you can, but not too much so you can...

Get Outdoors Downriver.