Hey all,
I'm one of the owners/mods at TGF, my username there is DrewJD82. We did indeed start the forum after TGP's bullshit (my DrewJD82 account was just permabanned on TGP today for foul language....on a forum with a curse filter...). The idea was to have a place that was less-moderated than TGP but without the politics/religion and keeping it 'clean' enough so people can view freely at work, since most of us are posting during the day while at work. Which really just means we put a curse filter on and I write my sentences like "Some f*cking c*nt at TGP probably saw me make my own curse filter and c*nted the f*ck out over it and reported me like a c*nt."
Every forum has it's own vibe and several of us agreed on how we'd want to run our own forum, so we made it happen. I wouldn't say we thought this place was "too extreme", I've been a member here for over a decade. I won't speak for the other owners, but I'm personally sick of politics. When you're a non-partisan who can't
stand the current state of either party, dealing with the reality that both parties do indeed exist is enough bullshit for me, I come to forums specifically to get away from that shit. Alas, Rig-Talk already exists and it's safe to say that those who post on gear forums know they can come here to discuss/argue politics, there's no need for anyone to try to recreate it somewhere else, IMO.
The vibe of TGF is mainly comedic, us mods/owners certainly don't take ourselves too seriously and fortunately, the members who have joined are cool enough they don't even make us do our jobs. There was an initial push of modeling users as a lot of the issues we had at TGP started in the Digital & Modeling sub, well, Rig-Talks own cunt Donnie B And His Merry Gang Of 200 Cunt Alts played a part in that, along with some moderators for a company that recently released a product that rhymes with Wad Vortex, but I believe a lot of that has been covered here previously. I think it's probably a 50/50 mix now of amp users/modeling guys.
I started posting on forums when I was 14, when Jemsite was in it's infancy. I'm 40 now and I've met some amazing friends and have had some awesome life experiences as the result of posting on a forum. I'm a gear nerd, I love all gear from all eras and love talking/learning more about it. There's zero desire to be "the big dog in town", we just wanted to create a bullshit-free forum.