> I know many people already think I'm some sort of hate-filled denizen of the Dark Side who likes to flame people just because there's a huge global conspiracy against newcomers to the forum. People who believe this, I am about to make your day.
>
> I want to post a link to something from the forum, way back in ancient history when people wrote things here that were funny and clever and well thought out, and which consisted of more than two lines of poorly spelled pointless garbage with AOL punctuation, and which could not have been more easily said in a chatroom to the one or two people it was intended for, without melting the few remaining brain cells of the rest of the community who still come to this forum seeking something to read that was not apparently composed by random selection of words by a dart thrown at a dictionary by a blindfolded gibbon.
>
> To anybody who is reading this and getting offended, SHUT UP unless your offense takes some form which will be interesting, thought-provoking, and/or witty. I will settle for even *one* of the above.
>
> If anybody brings out the "you're against freedom of speech" argument, I will personally track you down to your home or place of work and beat you to death with a hammer. Also, I don't care whether you've been at Rinkworks for one second or two hundred years. If anybody brings out the "you hate newbies" argument, all of the above applies but I will also make certain it is a *dirty* hammer.
>
> To anybody who is reading this and nodding in agreement, you can shut up too. Nobody, including me, who has been whining about the forum in private chatrooms for the last six months but not actually posting anything *good* has any right to complain. Can everybody who's capable of it please get off their butts and start posting some good stuff before we all go completely insane?
>
> I tried to do that instead of writing this post. But my creativity, originality, sense of humour, personal motivation and damn near my will to live have been sucked away into the giant black hole of suckiness this forum seems to have turned into. I have been struggling against posting something like this for weeks now. Darien says I am good at veiled insults, but I realise that if insults were Islamic women, this post would not only not be veiled, it would be wearing a sequinned thong bikini and dancing on a table.
>
> Brunnen-"never give up, never surrender"G

OK, maybe I'm not the best person to post a reply to this, but I would like to point out a couple of things.

First of all, when I first came here, Rinkworks struck me, more than anything else, as a place of FUN. Movie-A-Minute, the Dialectizer, Computer Stupidities (particularly and especially Computer Stupidities)...I got a lot of enjoyment out of all of these, and a lot of laughs. The Forum also contained many posts full of laughter-inducing stuff. There were many posts on serious topics, too (the death penalty, abortion, and other quite deep moral issues have all been discussed here) and sometimes the serious posts were also extremely funny. They were some of the best, but the non-serious humour posts had a lot going for them. My sense of humour does incline to the daft end of the spectrum, so I appreciated this. Now, although I agree that two-line badly-spelled posts are a waste of time, as far as I can see Sam deletes them pretty darn chop-chop before a) they get flamed or b) they clog up the forum or c) the flames clog up the forum. My point is that a post need not be on a serious topic to make it worthwhile and interesting.

My second point was just to say that Brunnen-G's post has, itself, triggered a lot of thoughtful, serious comment and (unless they've all been deleted) no flames at all. Does this look like a "Forum degrading itself" and decaying? I don't think so...

Si-"Serious comedy"-gi