> Yep, this is another "forum and chat stink nowadays" post. This time it has a more personal ring to it. I don't like what's happening with the state of things here at RinkWorks.

Well, since I was the one who took the blame for the initial bout of "forum and chat stink" (that would be almost three years ago now), it's only fitting that I pitch in. ;-}

> The decline of RinkChat concerns me more. When I go in there, I see the same twelve people, eight of which are idle. Contrast this with the amount of conversation that happens over AIM and in livejournals, and RinkChat is starting to feel like an off-shoot of the Rinkie community instead of its source.

For me, part of it is that I want to talk to my friends, and I don't want to talk to groups of people I don't especially care for. If I see a chat room consisting of Stephen and eight other people I have no interest in, I'm more inclined to go insult Stephen over AIM than to go insult him in the middle of a busy room of people I have nothing to say to. That might sound cold, but it's frankly honest, and it's not like there are two people I want to talk to and six hojillion peons. There are very few people who actively irritate me, so a lot of it simply becomes the noise level. It's not that I don't like the people so much as I simply am not interested in what they have to say, and don't want to try to sift through it. In the older, calmer days of chat, that wasn't so much of an issue.

Another point is that now I can see who's in chat before going in. So if I see Stephen sitting there idle and eight people I'm not interested in, I simply won't go in. If I couldn't see who was there, I'd simply have to enter to find out, and then I might get caught up in something that was going on, or discover that Ghost of Sam is present and Stephen's just off folding laundry like he usually is and maybe one of those random people is Dave logged in under a pseudonym doing something odd. But looking at a list of people I'm not interested in talking to makes me disinterested in entering chat at all.

I think the return of the /memo feature has been the one bright spot in the morass of chat politics lately - now it's possible to keep in touch with "chat buddies" who aren't around in a way that somehow seems less impersonal than e-mail.

I have to wonder if your resistance to the community moving away from RinkChat is why you're never to be seen on AIM anymore these days.

> In the past, people have left RinkWorks for various reasons, some by conscious decision, some by the demands of other life circumstances, and others merely by unintentionally drifting away. Sometimes people leave for good, and sometimes they just get some cabin fever and need a temporary break.

I've left several times myself. I think this newfangled habit of posting "farewell" messages to the forum is downright silly, frankly; even more so when the fareweller comes back a few months later. I don't feel that RinkWorks is something one is either a part of or not - if I don't post to the forum and don't show up in chat, I eventually get e-mails from people saying "where the HFIL are you?," but I've never sensed any feelings of abandonment. ?Right now, I'm particularly active on the forum. For the past month, I've been the invisible man. I don't think the tides of attention mean anything more than that - I've never "left for good." I simply don't get around much anymore.

> I either want to see RinkChat thrive again, as a center for a community of my friends and other people I like, or see that same community in an equally accessible place.

If you're trying to talk me into pdchat, forget it. I know all about the fights you've had with DH over your server load. ;-}

To sum up, I'm disjointed and probably not making any sense. You'll have to forgive me - I just got home from what was essentially twenty-six hours at work, so I'm a bit wiped out. But I guess what I'm saying is, I haven't abandoned the community. I think the community isn't as closely knit as it once was by simple virtue of its being an awful lot larger. When the community was you, me, Dave, Stephen, famous, BG, Iss, and Wolf, we were pretty close. Now the community is generous scores of people, and it's simply impossible for that many people to have the same sort of closeness. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's also not necessarily not a bad thing - I think the question you need to start with, Sam, before you ask "how do we fix it?," is "what are we fixing?." What is it that the community means to you that currently isn't being fulfilled?

--D