[thechris]

Congrats to the winners this month.

Here's another one of my too long to read posts.

I guess it's too late now, but one thing that probably would have prevented a lot of this would have been a secret system that was only visible to the mods. I think this was pitched before but many of us seemed quite keen on actually seeing what our stats were. Unleashed the Pandora's box.

My experience on here is totally changing, though, I can say that much. I don't know what it is, but I have to be honest and say that I don't feel as compelled to talk toys on here as I did originally. I just find that I get annoyed on here a lot now. I can't help it. This forum used to be busy with what felt like 90% toy discussions, 10% general discussions. Heck, I love general discussions, but now it's turned into more like 60% general discussions, 40% toy discussions.

Now I don't even feel like I can post anything remotely off topic because there used to be an unwritten rule where we could post the odd off topic post but knew all had a certain feel and self policing where we kind of realized if we were going too off topic but now, when I go into a specific thread, I see like 5 or 10 off topic posts in a row. I feel so taken back by this that I don't even know how to get the thread back on topic and I don't want to contribute to further bringing it off topic so I just don't bother posting anything at all.

And I'm not going to point fingers, but I'm finding a lot of people are just being downright rude to me. The air has been particularly sarcastic and snide lately and this forum actually feels quite unfamiliar to me now. And there's such an overwhelming amount of goofy posts now that I find myself having to chop through 10 dumb threads before I can get to a proper one. And by dumb threads, I mean ones with questions that have been answered 100 times. Or ones by people trying to be cute. I mean yeah, I've posted fluff threads, maybe a couple here and there, but I find the SAME people are posting hundreds of "What girl do you think is hot?" "What's your favourite brand of cheese?" "How many people shave their pubes?" posts and it's pissing me off. The WORST ones are the ones that have totally ambiguous titles reading something along the lines of "I'm so excited about..." Hmmm, yes, this piques my interest, so I click it and get: "...my first kitten! How many of you like cats???" I don't mind a couple of these every so often, but there have been a LOT of them.

And I don't have an issue with n00bs. I'm not far from that myself but I have familiarized myself with everyone here and kind of assimilated into this community. It's just when I see that just about every n00b has 2 or possibly 3 times the posts of some of the most frequent posters in the past, it's a little suspicious. Maybe that was the intention of this contest, but it wears thin. And as quickly as we're getting new people on here who are on a posting marathon, it also looks like we're losing some of our original regulars. I know out with the old and in with the new wasn't the intention, but it seems like that's kind of what's going on.

And I've got to just say it. There's this new "We're the new kids in town and we n00bs are gonna take over this place" attitude with n00bs aggressively ganging up on some of our most respected veterans and it's really starting to annoy me. Not necessarily towards me (although I've tasted some of it undeservingly). Part of this was due to the amount of negativity that was expressed at some new posters who were thought to have been going on a fluff post marathon to pad their post count but even after people have been letting bygones be bygones, some people just aren't getting over it. It's the classic "nerd never forgives the jock" syndrome long after the jock has moved on.

I come home from a long day at work and kick back and want to relax. I come on here for a little bit and I don't want to deal with attitude. I don't care who picked on you last month, it wasn't me. Get over it. And yeah, I guess I also have to get over it, but I also don't have to hang here and put up with your crap. I've been nothing but welcoming to n00bs just as everyone was welcoming to me when I first joined but now I no longer feel welcome. I feel completely alienated, but hey, I've made some good contacts on here and I'll still post from time to time, but it honestly isn't the same anymore.

I realize that things grow and they change and that's cool. I don't expect this forum to stay the same for one person's sake. This isn't a, "Waaa! I'm leaving now." post. Like I said, I still plan on posting now and then, but if anyone was wondering what my thoughts were on the current state of things and also why I've suddenly not been posting as often as I used to, this is why.