Just a suggestion, would it be possible to split this section in two? Some collect modern world coins, some ancient, some medieval, yet all those are mixed here.
There are also some who collect a mix of the areas and enough different combinations that we could never make it work for everyone. The last time it came up, some suggested we could flag our posts so I start my titles 'Ancient:' so people who are not interested can save the click. Personally, I have some interest in modern coins but none whatsoever in bullion or medals made for collecting so I'd appreciate some system telling me a post is Bullion or NCLT or whatever you call your made to be collected but never circulated medals. I believe we have shown few are willing to tag their posts this way so all of us will end up clicking in and backing out when we get fooled by a title that might be of interest but turns out to be from the dark side (however we each define that).
Then again, we do have a separate "US coins" forum, and for me the US is one of the foreign countries that I more or less actively collect coins from. So maybe we should do away with the US forum too. As a collector I am not really interested in ancient or bullion coins. Well, bullion pieces have their own forum here (where things get pretty heated sometimes). As for ancients, usually the subject - and the now improved mouseover display - will tell what a topic is about, so we may read or skip it. Works fine for me, and from time to time I read a post about ancients which I find interesting but might have ignored if it was in a separate forum. Christian
Im content with it being in one forum. I enjoy world coins as much as ancients and as I have said before...I have gone and bought many modern world coins cause I liked what a fellow poster shared themselves.
I'm not interested in modern World coins (or in anything else non-ancient/medieval), so I wouldn't mind if the two ever got split. But I have no problems with how things are run right now. As for accidentally clicking on a topic I don't want to read; it doesn't really bother me, because it would usually take basically no time at all to back out anyways.
I am not going to spend any time looking to see the percentage, but I think that the overwhelming majority of coin collectors collect United States coinage only. That would be the reason for a USA section at CoinTalk. Don't get me wrong, I love "foreign" (ie non-USA) coins and probably have more of them than USA coins, and have recently started to appreciate ancients, but "The squeaky wheel gets the grease". Perhaps we should split ancients away from foreign, then we could split them into Roman and Greek, then we could split down the Roman into separate threads...pretty soon each coin would have its own thread. OK, now I'll stop.
Kentucky, that's like saying split US coins by denomination or World coins by country. Ancients are a subset of coin collecting. Of course we could take it all to the extremes. But why would we? When I first began posting on CT, I was in favor of splitting the two categories. I still think it would be a good thing. However, there are times when days pass without a single posting from an Ancients collector and I think the same can be said for World coin collectors. I'm not so certain there are enough to warrant splitting the two. And, as someone said above, it's not a big deal to back out of a thread where you have no interest.
For the record, "stevex6, dougsmit and Ancientnoob" have consistently prefaced their threads with: Ancient => and then the thread title ... do you dudes appreciate this method? (I think it is very helpful) The thread titles that "I" hate are the ambiguous ones like: Need Coin ID or Anybody seen one of these? ... yup, in my opinion, those types of efforts are very *weak*
Aww thanks steve for pointing out our efforts... I say we keep it together and just try to make good titles. I enjoy seeing a chunky thaler now and then.
Some might argue that Ancients include coins through medieval period, and others would say it ends with the coins of the byzantine empire. Personally, Ancients include all coins Byzantine and older.
Forgetting someone? I find it very easy to prioritize the threads that are started with Ancient above the ones that aren't... I agree. What should I do for Medieval coins? Ancient?
Increasingly as I age I tend to use the term 'ancient' to mean 'ancient and medieval'. I have no trouble separating modern coins from the other two since my definition of modern coins are those using machines in their production (coin presses). Older methods lasted longer in some places (Chinese Cash and Russian Wire money come to mind) but coins struck in collars with power beyond a strong arm are modern. When I say I collect ancients, I really am saying I don't collect machine made coins.
Well, we can now place our cursors over the title and the first post will pop up. So to those that don't want to read about that thread, no need to click it.
i dabble in world coins as well as ancients and kind of like the mix up here. it is nice to have a threads titled "new byzantine coin" or "post your german coins" however....but i'm not picky. made by machine is my ancient/modern line in the sand also....but i don't miss out on any sleep on how anyone defines it. just dig them coins!
