I go back occasionally to my first love among rose forums but find it difficult to search for a particular message unless I remember the name or nick of the original poster.

mariannese, I find it useful to use quotes to indicate a string. For example:

"rose rosette"

The next word could be either virus or disease so rather than doing 2 searches, I just use quotes with the first two.

Every so often I'll meet someone in real life from RGR, and they'll ID themselves by their RGR name.

Folks going onto the site need to know that there was no moderator, and that for years it got taken over 95% by a troll attack of massive numbers.

Wow Ann. Makes me wonder how sad (or deranged) someone has to be, to troll a garden forum? I don't think kids would even think to do that, so it was probably adults. People that know me think I'm a hermit, and I guess I am, but I just can't deal with most people. lol

edit* I was checking it out, and I see advice like "throw away" any rose that gets any black spot because "it will die". If I did that, I wouldn't have any! Even the good ones get it on a leaf or two, geeze. lol

OH my user name here is based on a Warcraft character I have. My real name is Rhonda, but I'm used to being called witchy from playing that game for so long.

stillanntn6b, Color me intensely curious. Why on earth a troll attack on a rose forum? I could understand vegetables or orchard crops, if someone(s) wanted to promote various agricultural products or hybrid varieties, but why roses? I wouldn't have thought there was enough money in the rose business to attract a troll army.

Here's an example from Gardenweb. Someone in southeast Asia put up a picture of a beautiful HT. But I knew that HT had only been introduced eight months earlier (I knew the hybridizer and that he was no where near se Asia.)

So I asked how the poster managed to grow that rose. I got an on line response that was dripping in snottiness to the effect that I was stupid for not realizing that he could grow great roses and maybe I didn't know the country he lived in.

I responded with my reasoning that even if he got budwood, it was unlikely that he could propagate a budded rose big enough in the time available to produce that large and perfect a bloom. ( I then emailed spike about the problem.) To my knowledge that poster wasn't heard of again.

BUT , off line, I got an email from someone I recognized from Hawaii, and she included a link to the photo she had posted, and pointed out how the troll ahd photoshopped her image to match the petal colors of the rose in question.

Why did a troll do that? Boredom? Wanted to hook up with someone in this hemisphere? I doubt we'll ever know.

Maybe he was going to try to sell cuttings of his imaginary rose? I can't wrap my brain around all that effort to steal a photo, photoshop it, and claim it for giggles. People are crazy. lol Are there rose groupies we don't know about?