Okay, lemme recount my memories from way back when. I of course can't claim total accuracy, as we like to remember only the best parts of things we no longer have.
As stated, there weren't that many of us who were active. We did indeed consider ourselves "better" than the inhabitants of several (most) other online boards (to avoid the forums/fora discussion). However, when someone new popped up to ask a question or simply to introduce themselves, we raced to provide as informative, detailed and welcoming a post as possible. It was almost a sort of competition, see who can welcome the new guy first. I think some of us may have been so open and welcoming just to prove how much better we were than the others...
But we also tended to think that the game itself would filter out the undesirables. We assumed that the complexity, difficulty and niche style of Dwarf Fortress would weed out everyone but other people like us (ha, "like us"... We were still an incredibly varied group), so we could be equally friendly to everyone popping in and the ones we didn't like would simply leave of their own accord.
This didn't always work, but it was a nice theory.
In regards to the forum subsections, we tended to (again, I cannot say this is a fully accurate recollection. It is only the way I remember it) treat questions the same way we did newcomers. First one to provide the most detailed and helpful post wins. These posts were supplemented by, not replaced with, wiki links (this was quite possibly due to the rather poor quality of the wiki back then. And that's not to say we didn't get a bit too link-happy from time to time...).
Various Nonsense (oh how I remember that color scheme...) was filled either with long-winded discussions or roleplaying threads (I think a fine example would probably be Zustashïger, a continuing story where each successive poster would write the next portion). We abhorred memes and spam, regarding them as qualities of "lesser" boards and the surrounding presence of the Internet, which we considered ourselves relatively isolated from. The closest thing would probably be the "9:00" thread, which was a temporal anomaly created by buggy forum software. People would post in there simply to see where their post ended up.
As for the discussions, we could fill numerous pages with wholly related and sometimes even sourced arguments. We did get a little bit hostile from time to time (as can only be expected when talking directly about politics, religion and music), we were generally pretty good about nipping it in the bud, agreeing to disagree, and then performing the Internet equivalent of a group hug.
I had personally disagreed violently with quite a few people I still regarded as intelligent, and there was no animosity in our posts thereafter. I think it was this ability that made me think so highly of our group.
People would practically be flogged for using the pseudo-word "lulz" (heck, even just "lol"). There was no reason for posting stuff like that. Not to say we didn't have fun, relax or goof off. We just did so in our own way.
Poor grammar and/or spelling was generally not attacked, because the only people exhibiting it were simply not very comfortable with English. Most people actually gave enough of a damn to put some effort into making their posts as clean and easy-to-read as possible.
Sure, we had our "village idiots". But it was generally only one or two of them at a time, and they weren't often encouraged.
And Aqizzar, this has been going on for a very, very long time. Of course you didn't see any of the "good old days", because you weren't here yet. The "old guard" has been sitting quietly and waiting for the bad people to go away. We're still hoping that the board will simply "snap out of it" and return to normal.
Well, I've stopped regarding the current situation as a "phase". I honestly don't think things are going to return to the way they were. This forum is changing into something else. I'm not saying it'll be objectively better or worse than what it used to be, I'm just saying I won't want anything to do with it. Personal preference.
A preference that I think is still shared by a few of the people here.
I still think it's funny that each time I mention stuff like this, numerous examples of what I'm preaching against come and agree with me to some extent.
Yes, that was a blatantly hostile comment. But you know what? I'm tired. I'm really, really tired.
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Topic: A new world... (Read 9021 times)