MTbers are never honest about their abilities / skills even anonymously.
Whenever I’m on an MTB forum (STW is the very best of the bunch for honesty in fairness) and someone is waxing lyrical about some trail or other…. “yeah it’s all pretty standard stuff, you know – starts with a 6ft drop to flat, then you might have to throw a few pedal strokes in to make the 20ft double cleanly, then it’s just the near vertical off-camber root and rock fest and the 8ft step-up to the 8” wide landing and then you’re on to the really tough part of Verderers”. I’m reminded of a thread on BikeRadar back when it was still MBUK, it was called “how big a drop can you do on a Hardtail”.
Some youngster (based on their use of language) simply wanted a yard-stick of what you can get away with on a hardtrail, as we know there is no real answer to this, so many factors, most of them not bike related – but most of the posters really focused on the “can you do” part of the question.
First poster – “I’ve been doing 2-3ft drops on mine for years, not issues yet”
Second poster- “I’ve been dropping 3-4ft to flat for years on mine, easy”
Third poster “6ft, no biggie”
And so it carried, on by the end you’d expect to hear about how the poster had to fit surplus NASA heat shields to their downtube to survive re-entry, even stranger than that posters who got in early with almost believable stats must have got spooked through the day and came back with tales of 8ft drops onto jagged rocks “In Afan” that they’d forgotten about.
I’m not a great rider, I’ve been doing it for over a decade now, but I’m pretty cautious for lots of sensible, boring grown-up reasons, in years gone by I’ve tried to read up about places before I go there only to be put off by tales of heroism and daring or worse yawning reviews of places seemingly too boring in their simplicity for the poster to bother saying if they were fun to ride or not, only to find the reality is slap bang in the middle so whenever I read someone saying how Rampage esq Willy Waver is, or how the Plenny is only really suitable for the sick or elderly and no challenge I wonder aloud how big a drop they could do on a hard tail.