> Why am I not coming back to the public rooms in RinkChat for a while? Because I can't handle it. I love the friendship, but I simply can't handle it anymore.
> Why enter a place that annoys me?

I think the others who have replied to this are missing the most important point of Ellie's post. I've been watching Rinkchat fall to bits for quite some time now and, at the risk of stirring up more trouble than it's worth, I also feel I need to say something about it.

I'm very much afraid that we're in danger of losing the community feeling which has always set Rinkworks apart from the rest. Maybe this is a natural result of the site's popularity which brings so many more people into chat. Of course it was easier to get along when there were only about a dozen regulars, but saying I'd rather go back to those days would also mean I'd never have met my friends among the more recent arrivals (like Ellmyruh).

I always saw Rinkchat problems as a simple case of "lamers vs. not-lamers" which was usually solved sooner or later by a ban. But now, what I see as a more serious problem is the sheer number of people who are in my personal "not-lamers" category.

When you have about six close friends, everything's sweet. The trouble is that now, in Rinkchat, I have those same six close friends, and about twenty other rather good friends. And at any given time, some of those people will not be able to stand some of the others, and some of them will be in a silly mood when I'm in a serious mood, and vice versa, and the end result is that everybody gets on everybody else's nerves until the whole thing explodes.

I never, ever thought I'd be in a position to complain about having *too many friends*, and I'm not really complaining, but the other thing is that it stretches your emotions thin. People who are well able to cope with supporting one or two friends through various life crises can falter when faced with twenty worried people, each with their own problems and needs. I'm thinking of Sam more than myself in this context. Each time one of us has needed his care and empathy, he's been there for us, and that kind of emotional investment in such a large group of people takes a toll.

An aspect of Rinkchat's current decline (which I know I'm guilty of) is a reluctance on the part of ops to take action against idiots. Everybody's happy to kick when some jerk comes into chat and is blatantly offensive, but most of us have been doing nothing to prevent the takeover of sheer stupidity and witless babble. I feel that any chatter who is incapable of contributing to the conversation (or failing that, merely watching it without getting in the way) should not be there. Unless Sam tells me otherwise, I'll be kicking and then banning anybody who talks like Radebur and isn't doing it for humorous purposes. I also have a personal opinion that any op who isn't interested in ACTIVELY maintaining a certain standard in Rinkchat should ask Sam to take them off the op list.

I don't want to lose the good friends I have here, and still less do I want to see them break away into half a dozen separate cliques which aren't on speaking terms with any of the other cliques. And I'm not capable of holding all the fraying threads together while trying to hold myself together in the middle of it all. I don't have any solutions to this but it needed to be said.

Brunnen-"I would also like to say that 'getting back to the good old days of Rinkchat' DOES NOT MEAN endlessly repeating gags which are now a year and half old"G