Note: This began as a collection of things I said in RinkChat, and now I've fleshed it out a bit into a post. The short paragraphs are the ones that I said in Chat.

I feel like one of those people who has only the a flicker of the slighest iota of comprehension of the other side's feelings.

I mean, people are saying, "None of my freinds are here anymore so there's no one to talk to", and they leave, and other people say the same things about them, and they leave and so on.

And new blood comes in, because RinkWorks rules.

But those people aren't like the old people who've left, and so the general colour of the community changes.

I mean, I've witnessed it. I've been here for a long time, at least since 1999; perhaps even before that.

I remember when we'd get new chat archives every week or so, and now there are months-wide gaps.

But is that a sign that the RinkWorks community is sucking, or changing?

Let me tell you: it's the latter. I've seen this happen before on other forums, and it's always the same.

Old-timers, the people who were around when the site first started, stayed at the site because they liked what they saw. But then the popularity grew and the whole place got a lot more diverse, and some people were uncomfortable with this. They declared that the community now sucked and that they were doing whatever, be it leaving the community or becoming a monk or any number of other things.

More than once I've found myself no longer feeling comfortable in the RinkChat community, but I didn't whine about it (the times I'm talking about :-). I just left; took a sabbatical, if you will. I found I didn't feel the need to come to RinkChat or the Forum anymore, and I didn't. The last time I did this, it was probably for several months.

But then, one day, I felt that I wanted to check out what was going on in RinkChat, and I did. I spent a little while here again, and--finding I liked what I saw--stayed.

Overall, the community has certainly changed. I wouldn't say it's better or worse; I still talk with people I like, I still make new freinds and I still have a lot of interesting, entertaining and cool conversations. Some people I like don't post here anymore, and I think about that sometimes and get a little sad. But I take solace in the fact that I've made new freindships, and overall I'm happy here.

In the end, it's up to you to decide the fate of this place, as you are its owner. However, I urge you, that if you find this place different than you want it to be, take a little break, instead of closing it altogether. A lot of people, myself included, would be very sad if that happened. Due to health problems I literally have no social contact with people my age; the entirety of my social life is with my (adult) relatives and my parent's freinds. In the entire Internet, I've found two places that I can stand to read and post at, and RinkWorks is the only one where I feel any sense of knowing other people (the other place is far too large and fast for me to really develop relationships with others).

I'm not trying to guilt you into keeping this place open because it's essentially my sole form of social contact with interesting people other than my mother and stepfather, but that's the truth. Such is life, I guess. I've certainly gotten used to saying that phrase.

Changing the vein of this post somewhat, I came to a thought as I was reading this thread. AIM has been around longer than this community and has pretty much always been adjacent to it, so I don't think that it's to blame. But you know what's new? LiveJournal. Many have mentioned that what people used to post on the Forum they now post to their LiveJournals, and I think that's one of--if not the main--reason why the RinkWorks community is becoming fragmented. Many small groups of people with associations to eachother are forming, and the larger RinkWorks community is becoming split up into many little bubbles.

It might seem kind of medieval to place the blame for the entire breakdown/transformation of an internet community on LiveJournal, but it's certainly something to be considered.

Anyways, I guess I'm going to end this post here, because I seem to have said what I wanted to say (although I have the distinct feeling that I'll remember something else .0017 seconds after I hit the 'Post' button and write a follow-up) and if I go on it'll just be a bunch of rambling that will dilute the whole thing.