Thanks to all of you for joining. The goal of this site is to have a fun place for cigar lovers to share their thoughts on every and any topic; hopefully including cigars.I apologize in advance for the very wordy post but I wanted to respond to many of the questions I received via PM, etc.
I know we all bitch and moan about the joecigar/cigarsintl banter but apparently there is something about it that we all love. I tried to keep this forum very simple, in much the same vein. It's about creating a community. Cigarsintl has roughly 4500 members but there have been about 900,000 posts to date. Cigar.com on the otherhand has nearly 4 times as many members but only a quarter of the posts combined within its many threads. Not everyone is interested in every post and that's fine... Don't read 'em. That's not to say that I won't create or give you the ability to create sub forums. I'm just not there yet.
Work friendly avitars and language on the banter. I don't have the time nor the will to police this thing. Therefore, I ask that everyone act like a grown-up and police themselves. If you're offended by the avvys, turn them off... I do.
I see this site coming together in phases and this is just the first one. I'd like to create an area that resembles beeradvocate.com where each logged in user can lookup and review/rate a cigar. I'd also like to have an area with all the coupon codes / free shipping codes and big cigar deals that are going on around the net. And ultimately, I plan to record a weekly audio podcast.
I also understand the reluctance for some of you to have to start all over again with being a "newbie". I offered the ability to change that and add the number of post you have on CI to this site. No one PM'd me with regard to that and now I'm rethinking it. This is a new thing. Let the post whores emerge on their own.
Appreciate all the feedback and I know that I haven't been great about being timely, but we'll get there.
