Daniel Beaver

I wonder if you could come up with some sort of pully systems, so that it could be a pump to prime?

You can't hide from us 

We use meetup.com (among other things) here in Houston. I won't say it's been the most successful tool we have, but there are several regulars that found our group through that site.

I'll have to give that a try.

Reddit is cute for showing off completed projects and capturing the culture, but not the proper layout for sales, write-ups, and organizing wars. I am assuming Facebook groups are more local and great for organizing wars?

Facebook has been a good tool for connecting with new nerfers in the Minneapolis/St Paul area of Minnesota. We have the very searchably named  "Minnesota Nerf" page and "Minnesota Nerf Community" group, which draws in a lot of randos to wars hosted by various people in the area. I do post war announcements on reddit and some of the discord channels, but I've never had anyone show up who didn't see it on NerfHaven or Facebook. I could see Facebook dropping off in usefulness in the near future as young people shun the platform en masse.

The disintegration of forums and the balkanization of online social media is not unique to Nerf at all. It's completely common nowadays to have multiple parallel social groups of a particular hobby active in the same geographic area, and be completely unaware of each other. It's interesting how the internet of 2000-2010 had a lot of centralized hobbyist forums that really brought everyone together, and how much that has disintegrated in a few short years.

I would take a look at these two threads first:

http://nerfhaven.com...-modifications/

http://nerfhaven.com...emade-blasters/