> Yes, we expect a lot out of people. However, the "lot" that we expect is PURELY the ability to write English correctly. That the grammar is correct and all the punctuation is in the right place. That is all.
>
> Please do not ever feel that what you have to say is not going to be interesting to *everyone*. I read every post here and while some of it is not interesting to me personally, most of it is. And if it's interesting to me, chances are lots of others will feel the same.

I take issue with this. Last I checked, I was still Supreme Dictator of this place and *I* expect that people also have something interesting to say. A post about what somebody had for dinner may interest a few people, but it's retarded and shouldn't be posted. If it's elitist to not want that sort of crap posted to this Forum, which should be a place for well-expressed intelligent opinions and/or amusing tales, then count me elitist.

Sam mentioned something that's important: we all get our crap cut. I've had countless posts deleted and I've been here longer than most (five years this week). Some of my posts get cut because they were part of weak threads, some of them get deleted because I was being an ass, some of them get deleted because they were crap. Probably most the stuff I post doesn't get a response -- this isn't a very high-volume message morum, nor has it ever been. The moderation on the site is just largely invisible, but trust me: it's there. The difference is that those of who've been around don't bother asking why our stuff gets cut, because we know the score.

I don't mean to slam knivestil. Quite frankly, I don't know much about knivestil and I don't really have an opinion on him or her one way or the other. That's how I am about *most* of you. This is the Internet. You're mostly a bunch of faceless people typing away at me in plain text.

(tangent about RW elitism follows)

Now, see, the Rinkies whom I do have opinions on are because I know them better. If you feel this community is elitist, that's because it is in a sense. A lot of us have met each other. Multiple times. We've been talking for years. If you want to be part of the "elitist community," it is up to you to do something to make the community give a damn about you. Come to a RinkUnion. Post interesting threads that ask provoking questions. Heavily moderate your own posts. If it means you post less, good. Make an attempt to be funny in Chat.

The thing of is, a lot of the stuff that I see on RW these days is inane personal junk. The rise of LiveJournal doesn't bug me too much because I don't really care about the personal lives of most the people here. If you want to be better accepted (at least by me), then you need to raise the quality of your participation. Surely people do more interesting things than a lot of our conversations would lead us to believe. Consider some of the great posts by people before in their areas of expertise. Wolfspirit's posts about science, Issachar's posts about Christianity, etc.

I'm really off on a tangent now, but my point is that I would personally love to see better posts on the Forum. If you look at my own personal posting history, you'll notice that I participate in a lot of conversations about politics (I'm a poli. sci major), movies (I watch too many) and philosophy (I have a lot of free time). You will, I hope, find precious few posts about what I did during a day or am doing. Not to say I'm a model poster, but I think I'm a decent one.

We need to elevate the level of conversation on both the Forum and in Chat. Everytime I look at either, they seem to have a lot of, "This is what I did today" type stuff (in Chat it's usually, "This is what I'm doing now"). Those that were around for the Forum's first few years will remember that it was often dominated by discussions about things, not things people did (is this distinction clear?). The first year of Chat it was dominated by that, as well as a healthy dose of silliness. I see too little of either these days.

Anyway, that's my tangential rant. Feel free to think I'm an ass; I won't take it personally (if you want to memo me and tell me so as well that's cool).

Stephen