QUOTE(davburr @ Dec 28 2007, 08:24 AM)
Many folks have been on here a long time and many of us have met numerous times, so for the most part, many of the regulars here are not only friends online, but also friends out and about, going to lunches, dinners, hanging out etc.
Maybe some of the newbies here think its all just a game and only about anonymous posting to be funny or create bs, but for the long time users here - its more then that... its about being a community of friends with a common bond (living in or having interest in Folsom)
Well, there's an inevitibility to all of this I suppose. I saw the same thing happen over at immatureapeforum.com (j/k). This forum is now old enough that there are cross-purposes to it, some at odds with each other. You have the "established community" and you have the new people who use it as a community resource to just ask a question or get advice.
Let me back up
Like you say, a lot of us have been here for years. We each came to this site for different reasons. Say suppose you came here because you wanted advice about someone letting their dog poop on your front lawn. But after a while you stuck around and over the years you really started to like the other people here. Even if you didn't ever agree with them, they were still fun to hear from. So after a while you relax and loosen up a bit. You start to trust each other to the point where you, say, want advice on heavier things, like whether or not to have a baby, or how to raise your children, or how to deal with health issues, or death or whatever. This leads to more trust, more loosening, and tangents that usually come back to the point, etc.
But to people first coming to the forum, they find this somewhat tightly-knit/loosely-strung group of oldtimers and say "I can't post here! They're speaking their own language. They're talking about werewolves for cryingoutloud" or whatever "they won't accept me!".
Honestly, can you blame them? Like that nice lady from EDH (whose handle I forgot - sorry) who was *really* brave to start a topic basically saying that very thing. Some of us welcomed her (if in our own odd way), and some of us said "don't let the door hitchya". Nice reception.
Now at the *same time*, you have people come in and misinterpret the casualness as normlessness (or "anomie" as my sociology professors called it) and figure they can just do these drive-by snipings like you describe Dav, using multiple anonymous id's.
I picture them as kids on tricycles riding around with squirt guns full of hydrochloric acid. This scares new people off even more.
So okay, we're not the experts and admins, but if all the werwolf talk is truly driving away readership in ginormous numbers, that's cool. We can take a step back and keep our mouths shut for a while and see if that helps at all. And in a similar fashion, if we've been here for years and this is the tenth "a dog pooped in my lawn" thread we've seen, instead of being bored by it, we should instead just hold our tongues and remember why *we* first came here, and maybe even give the advice we got when we first came here. That's doing our part to make people feel more welcome and not "overpower" the community resource aspect of this forum with the "established user gabfest" component I guess.
But what to do with the kids with acid? Well, I know people are busy, IP tracing is tedious, and maybe a lot of this enforcement is done privately, which is the way it should be, so we don't know about it. Suffice to say, if there is an effort to control this, it's not as obvious as the effort to get people to mature. In fairness though, it may be happening. But I think the best we old-timers can do is to simply ignore the acid-squirters. They *will* go away.
Yes, this big long essay of mine all comes down to
"don't feed the trolls". But also, to those of us who have been here a while, don't forget you were new here once too.
And to the new people... please, go ahead and participate. Don't worry, we won't bite (except on the full moon)
