Ok....I noticed something, and just thought it was worth commenting on. When reading the "magic" areas of this forum, if someone so much as hints towards the way something is done, the whole board jumps doen their throat and talks about how bad it is for someone's secret to get out. Everyone respects the method. In the mentalism and hypnosis sections, it seems quite the opposite. It seems as if people are dedicated to picking apart the way a performer "does it". In the best situations, it seems to be a study of the art, and in the worst situations it is merely to tear someone down. Why the difference? I realize that I cant be the first person to ever bring this up, but I can imagine how I would do a forum search for it.

This is my biggest annoyance as well, especially because the public areas of the Magic Café rank so high on Google searches - you can find out many methods just googling it and reading the relevant Café posts that turn up.

I recently reported a post for this, but the moderator didn't understand the explanation in the reported post so it wasn't considered exposure - maybe that's one reasons why it's more common in this section. Descriptions of mentalism effects can be hard to decipher if you're not into this stuff (which hopefully limits the damage somewhat.)

A lot of people also seem to think that posting Byzantine explanations of Derren Brown's effects increases the perceived size of their manhood.

Well, I'm not really complaining about the secret being discussed....I'm just astounded at the different way of conducting things. In the "magic" forums it's, "Respect the performer, and appreciate the fact that he's managed to fool us". Here, it's, "Who does he think he is, using a method that has been used before? he's obviously doing xxxxxxxx" You know what I mean? In the magic forums, everyone thinks Copperfield is a god, and Criss Angel is dirt. But everyone in between is respected as a peer. But in the mentalism and hypnosis threads there seems to be a compulsive need to either diefy or destroy every other hynotist or mentalist, rather than respecting each other. Just an observation. Personally, I don't consider myself a hypnotist or a mentalist, but I have developed a great interest in both, and I'm looking into them to see if I want to dedicate myself to one or both at some point. But as an outsider, I see things about the behavior here.