so, i've come to stop by and wanted to say "Hi"

What's new or old these days around here?

laters

Hi.

All the good threads have closed down, even more things are broken than ever before, chaos reigns, the hot tub is inexplicably on fire, and the milk in the fridge has gone bad.

We still have the lifetime supply of bananas though, so all is well.

and we're all out of coffee.

THE APOCALYPSE IS UPON US!!!

thats no place to live, i mean hell is ok, turmoil is great but no coffee thats just torture

The MP3 player broke, so all we're stuck with is Muzak from a kinda broken tape machine.

Downloading games now takes two clicks instead of two clicks, so the torches and pitchforks are marching this way instead of that way.

The rest is pretty much the same.

so all in all still the same just that more of the great people here left

I'm still here!

*rimshot*

one of the last and probably the one turning the lights off at the end of the day

But also more of the awful people.

In reality, the one big change is that there is now (discreet but apparently effective nonetheless) moderation. And this transformed the forums quite a bit. It happened too late to prevent many good people's departures (and to prevent the remaining ones to be aware of what's lurking in each others' skulls), but it happened.

So, the forums are still closer now to what the were a few years ago. In a good way.

moderation? thats a new one except for removing posts that been downgraded to hell and marked as spam

Posts being removed by the "report as spam" feature (I forgot what it is *actually* called) still happens, and I consider it to be a major flaw in this forum.

On the other hand, moderation is definitely occurring; some particularly nasty posts that I reported (including at least one that was very clearly a personal attack on me) were deleted. On the other hand, lately I haven't seen any posts that are bad enough to be reported, so it seems that the moderation has had a deterrence effect. (The sort of things that are grounds for moderation include homophobia and transphobia, and I would imagine that racism (especially if a word like the n-word gets used) is likely also actionable.)

Another issue: The website no longer shows notifications for things like replies, chat messages, friend requests, and game updates.

Yes, moderation, for real, with moderating moderators who moderate. And warn and ban and stuff. And refer to an official code of conduct and everything.

Given the population increase, the forum would have kept spiralling down, if left to self-moderation. Or maybe it had reached the bottom already. But anyway, it's back to breathable levels of decency. A level that the okay people would not have left.

I doubt many will come back, unfortunately. The nastiest period of the forum may have durably marked the memories and defined its image to some of them.

But at least, in this environment, new may come.

so theres still hope left then

maybe if it really is as stated before i wouldnt have had to cancel my GA last year in this environment now?