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Son, we need to have a talk.

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Ballard:
It's interesting how as more and more forumites meet in real life, and large-scale continent-wide meet-ups become a regular thing, the virtual connection between the same people begins to fall apart.

Someone said recently that we're all here because we're not that great at this kind of stuff in real life, and I wholeheartedly agree with them. Many of us use the internet as a social tool, to stroke our egos and make friends without the pressure of the physical world and, to some extent, to be appraised as people in a less hurtful way than if someone did it in real life. Maybe as we start changing that and moving beyond avatars to real faces, a tight-knit community online becomes less imperative.

Guys honestly these forums are that friendship that you had with a member of the opposite sex which always seemed like it was deep, and went beyond sexual attraction. The one that you couldn't ever keep together or find reasons to renew once something of a romantic sort came and went. It just isn't going to be exactly the way it was before! A community will change like a living thing based upon who joins or leaves it and neither expecting nor desiring stagnation will help it be a great place.

In-joke has piled up upon in-joke and we're taking it far more seriously than necessary. There is being too mean and there is not knowing how to take a joke but none of that is being argued here. I'm only saying that the sooner we all realize and accept the fact that the forums are bound to change, the faster what feels like a rift in the community will heal. Old posters are bound to leave, new ones are bound to show up. The content won't stay the same, as a result. But we can always make it fun and exciting and worth it to be here.  The minute we quit beating dead horses.

And for the love of god don't post threads whining about other people whining.

crohnsy:
I will stand with Patrick on this one.  I've lurked enough to get a picture of this forum.  There's the clic of people here who are all friends and have known each other forever  that just seem to not want new people around.  Theres this image that new users are welcome but its a pretty daunting task to break into a clic thats unwanting of meeting new people in the forum. obviously not everyone in this group are like that, but there are a good few and they make their opinion known at every chance.

If you can't handle that this forum grows and changes then it should be locked with the selected memberbase. 
It could be like that forum with only one user

Ballard:
To be fair, I registered almost two years ago and breaking into the clique was just as daunting back then.

That's just the way this forum works and that's fine. But the teasing of newbies used to be good natured since there was an established community, and now that new members are replacing older members rather than just joining up, it's gotten mean spirited.

KvP:
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.

Dazed:

--- Quote from: Ballard on 02 Feb 2009, 08:59 ---Patrick you fuck I thought this was going to be an updated thread about The Talk and how we grow up sexually. Not this bullshit.

--- End quote ---

I'm totally in favor of changing topics to this mid-thread.

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