Pretty much all of this. The community here isn’t just the people, but the relationships that develop between the people. Any barriers to connections will destroy the community. If we don’t feel comfortable sharing personal stuff, or talking amongst ourselves like friends instead of randos on the internet, then there’s less of a community there. I’m not saying the purpose of the BBS is to facilitate friendships per se, but to actively tear down existing conduits to community building just seems unnecessarily dickish IMO.
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I wish I could have gotten some of that, but the timing was a little off. As someone who regularly makes their own bread, I would have loved to have this, and the symbolism of the gesture would make it even more meaningful to me.
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Would you really want to stay a member of that club? 
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Not really.
This is a question a lot of us are probably asking ourselves right now.
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Memories. I actually boycotted BBS for a long time because why would you need to go to a second website to comment on the cool tool Mark posted about?
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@orenwolf, I don’t really have any strong opinions on ending Regular since I’m far less invested in the BBS in general due to the recent decade ban of @OtherMichael that’s never been addressed. In my opinion, @jlw made a shockingly bad call on giving @OtherMichael a ten year ban. There have been people sexually harassing women, spouting racism and misogyny, and other far more serious transgressions and violations that got much shorter time outs, while @OtherMichael’s post wasn’t even a clear violation of anything in the community standards, and if somehow interpreted that way was totally undeserving of the extreme overreaction of a decade ban.
@OtherMichael’s post was based on him not having complete information about @ModusOperandi’s ban, was something he really did have a legitimate stake in worrying about, and should at most been deleted, or at best been addressed and clarified by the admins. That ten year ban is such a serious failure of leadership and moderation that it’s a major violation of trust for the BBS community. It shows that not only will unfair and capricious misuse of admin powers happen, but that mistakes in moderation will be tolerated and ignored rather than being addressed and fixed. When are the admins going to correct this mistake?
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I going to work now and I’m not looking at this for the next 12 hours. If this all goes away in total by then, google me. I’m findable.
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I used to post every day—several times every day, for years—at a bbs that went away recently. I had made real friends there, and it felt like home. It sucks when you feel like you’ve lost a community.
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Still hurts to see a thing you’ve created turn into a monster.
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Add me to the list too, please.
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Proper thread for requesting purge is here: Request list to be deleted from partially, welcome thread, lounge archive
I will have to trawl my notifications but I will attempt to honor all requests, regardless of which thread it’s posted in.
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Remember disemvoweling? Antinous? Good times my friend. 
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Leaving town just before she showed up? Yeah, that’s bad timing alright!
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I don’t think that’s actually backed up by real-world research, it’s just a thing people keep saying. We can’t even really say what we think that number means or what happens when we exceed it. Dunbar himself tried to informally explain it as the number of people you’d not feel embarrassed about having a drink with if you bumped into them. For me that number would be maybe 5. For people living on the east coast of Canada that number would be 7 billion and rising. I’m not trying to pick on Dunbar’s colloquial explanation which wasn’t meant as a definition, I’m just pointing out that how we behave as a community is more about our values and culture than about how many people are in the community.
If you binge watch shows on Netflix you might be familiar with a hundred new people a week and their complex relationships with one another. I could easily sit down and have a drink with Mulder despite not having watched the X-Files since I was a teenager. There are plenty of people out there who are more familiar with the personalities and relationships of 802 different pokemon than I am with those of my co-workers.
I don’t mean to pick on you because this thread isn’t about you specifically. I get that a lot of people here feel this change will affect them in a negative way. I just don’t understand the predictions of dire consequences. It’s quite possible the best thing that BB could do is close the entire BBS down and stop wasting resources on it. If some people decide to never come back to BBS that’ll probably be a good thing or at least a neutral thing for the majority of them (not because this place is bad for you, but because if you leave something and never come back it’s a pretty good indication that leaving was a good decision).
I feel sad because people are sad and people might leave and I might miss them. But as far as empty phenomena go, this is about as empty as it gets.
Getting into a fight with mods about other people getting banned is always risking a ban of yourself. You don’t know what happened and they aren’t going to tell you. What if someone got banned because they were PMing other users dick pics? Is that something admins should air on a public thread to explain why the ban happened? Mods have hard jobs we shouldn’t make harder. Yes, it means opaque decisions made by unaccountable people. The alternative to that is developing justice infrastructure (judges, lawyers, courts) for an online message board.
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Excellent. The caste system must die. This is precisely why I let my regular status expire, deleted my old account and posted here less. There was too much of an “in” crowd and, while I was part of it for a while, I noticed how shitty this really was and sometimes it got turned against me, and also folks I liked to converse with… and more often than not, the conversations became about each other rather than the stuff that happy mutants are made of: tech, goofing off, equality, love, fun, bananas. So, God bless you for seeing the light, finally. I might spend more time here again. We’ll see.
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Other communities have public ban threads where moderators explain their reasoning. Sometimes I’ve seen detailed logs posted (wherein a user claims to have done no wrong and the admin proved otherwise)
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I came here about eight months ago to make some disposable throwaway little comment about meteorites. Then, I liked the community here so much that I stuck around. A community is neither a website, nor a group of randos commenting on said website, but something intangible that develops over time and is nurtured with careful effort. I love this place now, and the people it attracts, and the intricate dynamics that develop. I stuck around through the contentious US Presidential Election, and despite the very dark mood after the election, because I knew that what we had created could ultimately survive this. We are more resilient than this.
Lately though, I just don’t give a fuck anymore. It’s like there’s a special effort being made to destroy this community. If so, I am too tired to fight it. I’m saddened, because this is a community like few others I’ve experienced online or off, and I want new people to have the same kinds of experiences that I did, but… I’m so goddamn tired of all of this. This has no reason to be, and seems more punitive than anything else.
I love this community, but not what it’s being subjected to.
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Nice job. How does it feel to destroy a community? How does it feel to ruin the ability of members to discuss important private details? How does it feel to destroy the hard work of others who built a community free of trolls, channers, and dolts?
This is just like Trumpeters gloating. It is wrong.
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N, hve n d wht y’r tlkng bt. Rlly. Nt cl.
Ah, yes, and the days when that was a new idea. 
(I never did understand those who said it was still readable with “some effort”, but it was still an interesting idea. I do like the “completely hidden behind an extra click or two” method a bit better.)
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Yeah, if I’ve got any timing at all, it’s bad timing!
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