Anthony, I think Rick & David would like to put this discussion to sleep, and bearing in mind the history of dispute that keris discussion has generated in the past, I think I can understand their reasons, but that said, I do believe that you have hit on a major reason for the paucity of activity in this keris discussion forum, and that is a lack of questions.
Questions are generated by curiosity, and in my opinion curiosity about the keris is generated not by books about keris, but rather by thoughts that can be aroused by books and other sources of information about the social & historical background that the keris carries as baggage.
Without questions there can be no answers, and perhaps many people do not have questions simply because they lack the knowledge to generate those questions.
I do not believe that there is anything faulty in even the slightest degree with the format & conduct of this discussion group, it is not broken, so really there is nothing for our moderators to fix.
To my mind if there is a problem, it is just that perhaps all of the easy questions have already been answered and nobody has yet gathered sufficient understanding to permit them to ask the hard questions. I doubt that there is much that can be done about that except to encourage an ongoing learning process amongst our participants.
Somebody commented I believe, that:-
"there is no new information coming from this forum because most contributors have exhausted their resources"
from my own perspective I would most gently suggest that in at least one case this is very far from true, however, for information to be presented, the questions need to be asked, and to me it seems that the foundation knowledge required to ask serious questions is very, very thinly scattered.
It can be very difficult to frame a question in a way that will give you what you want. I have sometimes spent days working on a question --- or maybe even weeks --- answers can be often be spontaneous, but questions need thought & research, especially if one does not know much about the relevant field.
There is nothing at all wrong with this Forum in my opinion, the lack of questions might be because of a lack of interest from participants, or it might be because of a lack of adequate knowledge to permit the framing of questions.
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