Welcome To New Forum

The service that hosted this forum for many years decided to shut it's doors, leaving us to find somewhere else to hang out and talk about the Ohenro. Thank you to Conforums for their past hosting services over any years, but welcome to our new home!

-->Even if you were already registered as a member on the old service at Conforums, you will need to re-register again here at Forumotion.

Over the course of time, i hope to manually add most of the old posts from the past forum site, just for historical information. Unfortunately, though, many of the old posts may now be lost and gone. My apologies to all who took the time to post them.

In particular, I don't see any reason to migrate all the old posts in the "Travel Companions" section over to Forumotion. They were requests for companions for walks in years past, so have no relevance today. Let me know if you disagree.

Likewise, I don't plan to migrate the old posts over from the "Forum Suggestions" and "Website Suggestions" sections. The old requests have been dealt with (or not) and don't provide any information new henro need to know.

As always, if you have questions or suggestions for improvement, feel free to let me know.

Dave

These things happen sometimes. It would be nice to have an archive of the old messages for people to look through, but either way, thanks for keeping things going!

Conforums gave me all the old posts in a board dump, but there is absolutely no formatting in them. I received them in a .tar file full of txt files, one for each post it seems. Opening one of the txt files, this is what I got:

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Getting Stamps In Your Nōkyōchō|1343949579|admin|xx|68.74.67.54|I added the below to the "What To Do At The Temples" page of the website, but thought it deserved a wider dissemination so am posting it here as well.<br><br>Dave<br>---------<br><br>A note about the stamp book: While almost all of us, nearly 100% i would assume, think that we are buying the stamp when we give the office the required ¥300 each time they put a new stamp in our book, that is really NOT the way we should look at it. All of us should take those thoughts out of our heads and simply throw them away. End of that story.<br><br>The way to look at the stamp fee is to remember that for some/many of the very remote temples, a large part of their annual income comes from donations. We, as henro, donate ¥300 to each temple we visit in appreciation of their significance as temples on and associated with the henro trail. We donate ¥300 to support their upkeep. Since no good deed should go unnoticed, in return for your donation the temple stamps your donation book to show that a donation has been made. We are not buying anything — we donate a trivial amount of money in appreciation for their efforts and they stamp your book in appreation of your donation. That's the story we should have in our heads. <br>|1343950217|admin

Re: Getting Stamps In Your Nōkyōchō|1372783101|daraohuiginnca|xx|99.246.84.240|It was not until half way through my walk that I began to wonder about the meening of the stamps.  One kind monk at a temple explained it to me and had a little paper he gave to explain.   It was very useful information and removed some of just going through the ritual of getting the Nokyocho.   I suppose I had finally relaxed enough to become more aware of the details.  I also began to take the time to get to know a few of the various statues in more detail which was good.   Ah and Oom became my &quot;friends&quot; as I arrived at each temple and they cheered me up.    <br>Thank you for mentioning the giving of the 300 for the stamps.   Giving is itself one of the major things a person can do throughout the journey.  Giving a smile, a kindness, an encouragement and of oneself seems the most pleasurable.   Giving of little tokens or food cements that in a practical way.  Thanks again for all you have done.<br>Dara --- March and April 2013. ||

Re: Getting Stamps In Your Nōkyōchō|1373639662|admin|xx|67.175.62.165|&quot;Giving is itself one of the major things a person can do throughout the journey. Giving a smile, a kindness, an encouragement and of oneself seems the most pleasurable. Giving of little tokens or food cements that in a practical way.&quot;<br><br>Lovely words. I agree totally. Thanks.<br><br>Dave||
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Well, how about that... This doesn't look all that bad. When i looked at it with Windows Notepad on my computer, it was pure nonsense. Pasting it here and the paragraph structure came back. Maybe there is hope of getting a lot of the posts back.

I planned to spend part of the 14th and 15th scraping whole pages off the old forum and pasting them into new posts on the new forum. I tried it in one of the Camping Out threads and i think it turned out OK. Rather than copying and pasting each post into a new stand alone post, a whole page of posts and replies go into one new thread.

We'll see. In the end, we may end up with a good portion of the old posts in one form or another.

Welcome to the new forum.

Dave

Administrator of a forum accepts the project as a work of love.
Thank you for opening the door.

An initiate,

D.