If you shave with a straight razor, chances are you already know The Straight Razor Place ("SRP"). If you do not, you probably should. It is the oldest, and largest "straight razors only" online community. I happen to be a developer on the site, ie I work behind the scenes and try to make the site an ever more pleasurable place to be. That means, I devote a good amount of my free to time on the site, either developing it, or posting there.

Of course, there are other shaving related sites, too. There is an excellent German language forum called Gut Rasiert ("well shaven"), and a number of English language forums, too. So why SRP? When I joined back in early 2008, I found the site lacking in a number of respects:

1. There was no easily accessible source for the wealth of information contained in the forum. We, ie a number of members who now form the Dev Team along with a number of motivated regular members, installed a Wiki. It is now called The SRP Wiki and contains many useful resources, among them:
   1. A beginners guide which is the best on the net in my opinion, and which can be downloaded as a PDF for printing;
   2. A database of straight razors which contains approx 625 unique razors at the time of writing (2010-02-07 11:52:46am);
   3. A growing number of illustrated tutorials for almost anything in relation with straight razor shaving, ranging from making your own shaving soap to restoring broken razors;
   4. A short, but very nice introduction to photographing razors, including a tutorial on how to build your own light tent (you can see the results in my own Shave of the Day Gallery.
2. The marketplace for selling shaving related goods was cosy, but inefficient. We replaced it with what is now known as the Classifieds section, which works extremely well. However, there was a trade-off: The cosiness got lost, ie members cannot properly discuss the items anymore. Reconciling effectiveness with community spirit is high on the list of priorities for me.
3. There was a chat system, but it was severely lacking. So we installed a chat system that is linked to the freenode IRC network, and it has yielded a small but highly motivated group of members.
4. The old reviews were realised as regular sections of the forum. We changed that, too. The new review system offers better functionality, the most prominent example being the ability to attach ratings to review items. However, we think we can do better than that, and are working on a new system that will offer even more features, and will be even easier to use.
5. Beginners can now request support from a group of users we call Mentors. They are senior members who are also experts in one of more fields, eg strops, hones, or razors. Through this mentor programme, we have been able to form an even tighter communitiy spirit.
6. Last, the site rules have been updated. They are now feature complete, and offer a perfect balance between freedom of speech for our members, and protection of invidual rights and interests. A great amount of work went into them, and I think it is safe to assume that ours are now the clearest, most transparent, and fairest rules of any shaving related site. We performed the update because the number of users has been growing fast over the past two years, and we needed to ensure that we as the management team would be able to ensure that all members are treated fairly.

As you can see, SRP is the shaving forum with the most active support by its management and development team. In fact, we may be the only site with a core team of five developers, and about 10 supports of said team. This gives us the ability to go beyond simple forum software, and enables us to produce unique resources like the razor database. And this is just the beginning. With SRP's imminent 10 year anniversary, we are currently planning a number of improvements to the site that put SRP even farther ahead of its competition. So stay tuned.

Regards,
Robin