Yes, the chat needs some of the more humorous vets like Robert Downey, Jr. needs a fix. The first time I was in the IRC chat was August 2000. It was much more enjoyable back then as it was still relatively new and more people were interested in it and it was about 3 or 4 times more active than it is now. After disappearing from the board for...*counts*...11 months, I went into the IRC chat again expecting to see 50 or so people in there since the site had grown so much since the last time I was there. Instead I found about 15 people(4 of which I recognized) and none of them were talking. Now I see less familiar names and more newbies/chat bums/silent types who actually talk about FF games and related topics...it's just not right. And the sad thing is that it's not getting more active as it goes along...at least, not at the rate it should.

As for the board, in the month and a half that I was an active poster over a year ago, I had about 250-300 posts. Maybe 10 or 20 of them were in gaming forums. the rest were in gen chat in numerous off-the-wall and random threads. Threads like 1000 things to be happy about where Del Snizz and Acmlm mercilessly spammed made you feel like you'd stepped into a very accepting environment and you weren't worried about what you said. During that entire time I can only think of 2 threads that I saw that were closed and one of those got reopenned. I have less than 50 posts since I started posting again 3 or 4 months ago and alot of that does have to do with lack of silly/fun/pointless threads to have fun with.

It's going to be a rather large pain in the ass to pull the board out of the groove it's in now. Save setting up something with the mods and admins to not close anything unless it's blatant advertising or flaming for awhile, letting them get used to the normal spammy stuff again, I can't see anyway to bring back the old atmosphere.

Now that I've put my 2 cents in, I'll just go back to minding my own business.*g*