State of the Forum

Looking through some journal materials of members, one entry intrigued me and as veterans that we are, what is your guys opinions on this,

In the journal, the person describe the current AO as a highschool, you have your cliques of emo goths, or nerds kinda just like a highschool and these personas come alive when topics are debated and discussed; also it seems that there is alot of melodrama that is being brought from the journals to the forums posts with the members as recently seen with the closing of a thread about one of our members stating his death, but never actually proving he died.

My question is do you guys think that AO has turned into a highschool atmosphere where cliques are abroad and the members bring the drama of their lives through the posts or through their journals?

Well... Things like that will naturally happen when you have the age and maturity level so low.

After reading the some of the journals, including the one where you have based your post on, I've really got nothing more to say that most of those journals are crap anyway. This is just a forum which rests in the infinite, abundant internet. There's no high school drama. The only drama that exists is the drama that you (rather, they) make up.

Whatever. It has nothing to do with me, although I won't say that there aren't certain recognizable categorizations that some people fall under. It's hardly that diverse anyway.

I wouldn't have cared, but those guys took it to the forum, and later on had to make me do extra work because of that. Boy....someone's going to be used as an example here of what not to do.

AO's community used to be cleanr it seems to have far degraded from what we had such as "intelligent discussion", great personalities and there was personal values brought to the forum but it wasnt as emo as all this crap lately is

We have a whole new batch of teeagers. They bring what they know with them and that includes how they interact. They'll either get bored and leave as it's no longer cool or learn to discuss things intellegently... eventually. lol

I seem to remember this happening every 4-6 months. Maybe it's because school starts then?

Well i really wouldn't say this place has turned into a highschool atmosphere. Just a few members fouling things up. Which the staff will stomp out.

I have to agree with Arrianna. It's just that we have a lot more youth that has come in. It didn't help with the great imgration either. When alot of us left these boards the forum culture changed with it. Now were seeing what it changed into. We look and see how diffrent it is. For a good deal of them, this is how it's always been.

We have undergone many changes since the start of this site/idea. We were at once a fairly small tight-knit community and now we are much larger and much more loose in terms of being a community as a whole. It used to be the case that I knew well at least half the active users and anyone with over a few hundred posts was pretty much known throughout the community. Unfortunatly we've gone from a site with a couple hundred active members, around 80 of which being fairly prominent and well known throughout the community to being a site with perhaps 400 active members (though thousands of registered members) with probably only 4-5 users which are well known even to the 'newbies' and these members are well known probably due to how often they post. I doubt that I'm one of them. Besides the lot of you in the 'veterans clan' how many people in the chat forum do you think even know my username? I remember when I had around 300 posts I started talking to Gig on the pm system, the head of the site, and he chatted with me from time to time, I was amazed! There was much respect with all members and each year we would even go to Otakon with eachother. That has changed unfortunatly...and I doubt things will return to how they once were.