> I know many people already think I'm some sort of hate-filled denizen of the Dark Side who likes to flame people just because there's a huge global conspiracy against newcomers to the forum. People who believe this, I am about to make your day.
>
> I want to post a link to something from the forum, way back in ancient history when people wrote things here that were funny and clever and well thought out, and which consisted of more than two lines of poorly spelled pointless garbage with AOL punctuation, and which could not have been more easily said in a chatroom to the one or two people it was intended for, without melting the few remaining brain cells of the rest of the community who still come to this forum seeking something to read that was not apparently composed by random selection of words by a dart thrown at a dictionary by a blindfolded gibbon.
>
> To anybody who is reading this and getting offended, SHUT UP unless your offense takes some form which will be interesting, thought-provoking, and/or witty. I will settle for even *one* of the above.
>
> If anybody brings out the "you're against freedom of speech" argument, I will personally track you down to your home or place of work and beat you to death with a hammer. Also, I don't care whether you've been at Rinkworks for one second or two hundred years. If anybody brings out the "you hate newbies" argument, all of the above applies but I will also make certain it is a *dirty* hammer.
>
> To anybody who is reading this and nodding in agreement, you can shut up too. Nobody, including me, who has been whining about the forum in private chatrooms for the last six months but not actually posting anything *good* has any right to complain. Can everybody who's capable of it please get off their butts and start posting some good stuff before we all go completely insane?
>
> I tried to do that instead of writing this post. But my creativity, originality, sense of humour, personal motivation and damn near my will to live have been sucked away into the giant black hole of suckiness this forum seems to have turned into. I have been struggling against posting something like this for weeks now. Darien says I am good at veiled insults, but I realise that if insults were Islamic women, this post would not only not be veiled, it would be wearing a sequinned thong bikini and dancing on a table.
>
> Brunnen-"never give up, never surrender"G


I've read through all of the posts to this thread so far, just to make sure I'm not repeating anyone. I myself have feel that the quality of the forum and the chat were going down at times. And I've seen a lot of people complain about it. I know that at least for me that this has made me more and more reluctant to say anything. I do not consider my opinion to be in the majority, but this is how I feel, so please hear me out.
I remember when everyone would always be talking about something or roleplaying in chat. Now if you walk in and try to start a roleplay half the time you will be shushed or kicked. Some people are annoying, but I've seen people get snubbed simply because they were not serious intellectual Rinkies. Because of a few people who cannot use punctuation a lot of cool people are afraid to try and do fun things.
A great deal of the population of Rinkworks was always teenagers. I remember it was all fifteen year old girls when I first came her(I myself was only about 14 or so). Now if you are a teenager, or worse younger, you are treated like a potential 74M3R.
Picking on newbies has become a Rinkchat favorite passtime. At first I thought it was funny, but after the fifty millionth time I began to wonder why these people were not just kicked and left alone. They're kids. They don't know better a lot of them. Should they be shunned because of it and treated like less than humans? People used to be mad at Sam because he kicked them. Now people are mad at Rinkies because they ridicule them. Personally that makes me feel the standards of regular have gone down. When I first came here people treated you equally whether you were new or old. Nobody was a regular or a newbie. Some people on Rinkworks have become very stuck up. It makes it harder for others to feel free to try and join in conversations.
Chat, often enough now, is dead silence interspliced with a few web sites. Occasionally you get a conversation, usually brief. I know that I have stopped myself starting conversations before because I thought that I might be made fun of. I don't know if anyone else has, but I wonder why the dead silence otherwise. (And none of this is a dig at BG or pretty much anyone who has posted about the decline. Actually these people have been some of the lesser of the Rinksnobs and deserve commendation, but there are still some people on Rinkworks with serious egos).
As for the forum I have not seen it decline as much as you make it sound. There was a conversation the other day on a seemingly newbie thread I found very interesting on why people try to be different. I read almost every post in the Acadamy Award thread. As far as I can tell, intellectual conversations are still happening. I read in a post on this thread that there was a conversation about black holes in chat the other day. Perhaps Rinkworks hasn't declined so much as a)Some people have become afraid to post or b)The good old days have become coated in gold in our memories so thickly we cannot see that we still have a good thing, as I think Andrea was inferring.
Me, I don't plan on leaving Rinkworks anytime soon. This is still the most intellectual place by far that I have ever been as well as the wackiest, the most creative and often times the most fun. There have been new people who don't have the punctuation of Kindergartener's, but I do not think they outnumber the intelligent population or even threaten it. I thought Rinkworks was the best site on the internet when I came here, and I've been here longer than any other place I ever came too. This place rocked then, and it rocks now, Rinksnobs or no.

Melanie