ES is where an ignoramus like me can learn just enough about EV's to seem like an expert, until you learn about EV's too. I love to teach, so I never tire of explaining the basics to new members. The info is out there, but at first read a new guy can't understand a word of it. The last place to get info, is from the guy selling stuff on ebay. He just wants to sell it. Dumb questions still welcomed here.
The big question in the Ebike sections is often which kind of motor to get. The needs of different riders varies greatly. You don't need to spend $3000 to get a bike that can go 10 miles at 15 mph. But some ready to ride bikes do cost that much. If you wish to have a flyweight motorcycle, you desperately need to know what didn't work for others. You can dump a lot of money chasing that goal with the wrong parts and having the same breakdowns others did.
Lots of good discussions happen here involving the smart people you can learn from. Good luck keeping up with them, unless you are educated in electronics. But there is gold in those discussions for sure. When Justin starts a thread, everybody listens.
Even if you are an expert, you can get stumped by a break down you haven't seen before. Then even a dummy like me can help. It's happened to us too in most cases, if we have ridden far enough. Tapping into guys who have more than 10,000 miles of ebike riding can be priceless. I only know one kind of motor well, but I have broken that type in nearly every way possible.
There are few ebike repair shops, so each rider needs to become a repairman, sooner or later. 90% of the time, it's either the battery didn't get charged, or a wire needs a jiggle. Which wire is the question of course. So ES becomes a very cumbersome version of a Chiltons car repair manual for EV's.
And then you have the battery section.
Every time you think the battery section has gone stagnant, something new comes along. But there is priceless information even in the oldest threads in the Battery Section. Building your own battery can be easy, or it can be the most frustrating thing you ever tried. Which it will be can depend a lot on how much time you spent reading the battery section. Reading the battery section can save you more money than any other part of the forum. The worst results are often when people choose batteries based only on price.
Occasionally the battery section serves as a place where we try to warn the world to never buy from a particular vendor. By that I mean when it becomes known that a certain character is actually committing fraud. We all have our opinions about legit vendors, some good some bad. But when we have an actual rip off artist loose in our community, we sound the alarm.
wonder who that was. Vigilant mods working behind the scenes to secure the site and get a backup copy, other folks starting backup sites so we could have a home if ES imploded... oh the days! The smell of bits and bytes in the air! 
