For me, ToB was a gigantic brainstormer, a green light that told me (almost) everything could go, a place where the silliest ideas could happen and burn for a week, or lay dead. There was good threads, the average, and the seriously ugly. Like every other forums. The main purpose was to -absorb- the spam directly from the main forums, a place for topics not serious enough, or so I tought. Eventually, people was out of fresh ideas, and the same trends repeated themselves. Thats where trouble started, because people brought their insanity elsewhere. It didn’t take long for ToBers to derail serious topics, in the main forum, and thats what brought the Tower down. The gods where angry. :spam:
That was years ago. The pandora box was open, and woe was brought into us. Things have calmed down a lot since then. But even then, when insanity breaks out in a thread, the old-by remember the age of the ToB, they remember the forum where their insanity, their creativity was free.
Today, I simply ask to look backward, and ask yourself:
From what I’ve heard, the ToB was shut down because it spilled over into the rest of the forum in an orgy of cliquey eliteness. Possibly if there were rules, and by rules I mean iron rules, about what you could take out of the ToB into the rest of the Agora, it would work.
This of course is assuming it really WAS where silly ideas and other humourous stuff could go, and not just a humourless collection of shit threads.
Booken has it about right with what happened, it was fun at first but it ended up getting out of hand. I really miss the edited polls and the ToB’s official battlecry though. I voted “maybe”.
Also, I was never sure of what SK was supposed to moderate.
If it was spilled out in the main forum why cut off the ToB and let the rest continue to pollute it? I don’t remember any elite clique-ness in the main forum, save for a about 3 people (yeah yeah) and even then, they were new; nothing that couldn’t have been solved with time. The problem was that we new people were going against the regular flow of the board, but that problem isn’t one that is restricted to RPGC, it happens in every forum.
But only I did not fight, no, I conformed! And here I am today.
That’s my point of view. I would have flamed me if I were a regular back then, but the clique problem wasn’t a really big deal. The “fall” of the ToB was a combination of that and other factors…and THAT’s where the clique ran wild. Not the main forum. What’s retarded is when you get all these asses saying how much they hated the ToB and how much it sucked, when they weren’t even around, nor were they even involved if they WERE. The hate is just limited to a select few people.
There was a negative effect even during the Golden Age of Babel: Reasonably funny threads stopped showing up in the main forum and it got boring for those unwilling to enter the tower.
^^^ Maybe Eden. But you can’t rest on silly catchphrases ALL your life.
That could be fixed by drawing a line betwee funny-normal (flash-videos, articles, what-have-you) and funny-spam (MSPaint battles, random humour) or something.
I mostly enjoyed it, but near the end, even I have to admit it was getting annoying. Personally, I think it was about when dark started pulling his pokemon shit that I started getting annoyed with the Tower in general. Not saying that was when it really got bad, it’s just when I started drifting away.
Some guy named Dark kept saying “Dark”. You know, like a pokemon, over and over and over, about 99% of his posts were just him saying “Dark”. I loved it when they fucked that up with the “pikapikawhatever” censoring trick.
The worst censoring trick ever was when a forum I was on was incorrectly filtered into old English. Actual Shakespearan English wouldn’t have really bothered me, but this showed no actualy understanding of what half of the words meant. Considering that this was a writing-focussed forum, that really pissed me off.
I’ve been banned from that forum twice, for thing it turned out I didn’t do, too.
Aside from that random, semi-on-topic rant, the dark thing would indeed be annoying.
I mostly enjoyed it, but near the end, even I have to admit it was getting annoying. Personally, I think it was about when dark started pulling his pokemon shit that I started getting annoyed with the Tower in general. Not saying that was when it really got bad, it’s just when I started drifting away.