This forum is really not bad for a new guy unless you are making a total ass of yourself. All you need is time. You will get noticed if you post consistently and aren't stupid. And even then you'll get shit every once in awhile, but everybody does and you should get thicker skin about it. This is the internet. Chances are the guy who broadsides you one day is going to up and forget about it the next. Don't take shit personally. I'm on amiable terms now with several people who I clashed with in my early days on the forum.
Gene has the right of it, in that over time people just become less attached to the forums. I wouldn't attribute that to meetups, or meebo, or anything else. It's just how things work. It's happened to me a number of times over the years. It will probably happen with this forum eventually. A cool regular poster turns a new page in his meatlife and stops posting, people get married, they just disappear, and your regular places become less attractive to you. And so more people leave. And it's supposed to happen, the forums aren't any fun if people who have no investment in it stay around. What will often happen in that case is that they will get bored and start shit. And new people will come in. I can't go back to my old forums, I don't recognize any of the regulars.
Honestly I'm not seeing the big apocalyptic crisis that this forum is going through. There seems to be an aversion to conflict that a lot of people on these forums share, like the DISCUSS forum and harsh words elsewhere are going to tear our community apart. This isn't the case. All the people I talk to who see DISCUSS as a blemish on the forums never participate in it. Guys, you know what's 1000x more retarded than DISCUSS? The comic discussion forums. I find them completely odious. So I don't go into them. I don't whinge about them. And I don't fear the board's impending shittification due to them, because they're relatively self-contained and harmless. And it's not like disagreement has been an impediment to internet friendship on this forum. Khar and I disagree on a whole lot of things politically, musically, socially, but he's still a rad dude and we get along. People disagree with one another all the time and it's rarely destructive. The dust up in the music judgment thread lasted less than a page and nobody left in tears and nobody became sworn enemies.
And we've got this new forum thing we're trying out, so what. If you're interested, join it. If not, don't. There aren't any gatekeepers. There isn't a "clique", there isn't a hidden forum you get invited to when you've been deemed worthy of it (I've been to forums that had one) There are people who have been here a long time and new people, and the latter becoming the former is a long process that is entirely independent of anyone else. People aren't going to seek you out as an internet pal because you're there and you know how fuckin' cool you are. You've got to put yourself out there.
tl;dr Don't be a pussy, QC forums.
