I was wondering what would happen when the daylight Buffistas showed up.

t going to the window, looking at the sun, liking the sun, reassured that I'm a diurnal Buffista

Lovely folk, all of you. Yep, all of you.

I've been thinking about this whole Lots of New Members/Explosion of the Board/Buffista Island thing. And I wanted to poing out a few things.

I realize that a lot of people are freaked out and want to stay the way things were, but we can't do that, while on the one hand it would be nice to have our own closed community we would stagnate.

Because we like to think "oh! we've been together forever and it's grand!" But that's not true, and I'm not pointing fingers or trying to make anyone feel bad when I say this, but there are people who we feel close to and would probably be considered "core Buffistas" or very active, involved Buffistas who haven't been around as long as we might think, maybe even less than a year.

So I wonder how they would have felt if we'd been "Buffista Island! New comers scary!" when they'd shown up, because I know if I'd discovered this board right now and found Bureaucracy right off I'd never post and go away because I figure y'all don't want me. Or maybe I would have posted some but by the time I got around to reading Bureaucracy I would have felt awkward and stopped posting. And trust me I would have ended up reading this thread because I'm like that.

Also just because we have 700 registered members doesn't mean there are 700 people who actively come back to this site to post or lurk. How many people here have registered for a board, checked it out, and then never gone back? I know I've done that on more than one occasion.

We can find out how many people are actually posting, and we can find out how many people activiated their accounts. But what we can't find out is how many people activated their accounts, perhaps lurked, and then went away and never came back. Every non poster maybe lurking (Hi!) but that's probably not true.

Not to mention that there was no way of knowing how many people were lurking when we were on Worldcrossing. Think about how many of us ran over to Worldwide Communications to look and laugh. Although I'm not sure if there was a way to track how many people were lurking at WX, I know I've added and then left and then added communities back on WX and just kept lurking.

Change is scary.

I remember when people hated Woldcrossing. They hated the lack of subscriptions, they hated the way the folders were organized. They hated the pictures. Worldcrossing was an icky change no one wanted, but we were forced into it. And Worldcrossing wasn't so bad. Okay the constantly going down sucked, but people learned how to navigate through Worldcrossing, the pictures turned into a popular feature and overall it wasn't horrible. Some people never even went to Worldcrossing because they hated the format so much but found other places to talk about Buffy.

Obviously this is a bit different than moving to Worldcrossing, but it was a huge change and people freaked out over it.

I keep seeing this fear of new people and I'm hoping it's not so much a fear of new people as a fear of all these new faces all at once.

Because I've seen a board implode on itself and it's not pretty. And I've seen a board not be able to gain new members and turn stagnate. Neither scenario is a pretty sight. One is a messy, ugly death with lots of hurt feelings. The other is a slow, sad pathetic decline where you hope for a mercy killing.

I don't want either for The Phoenix Board.

Change is scary. But not changing is death, and that's worse.

And that's all I got to say.

Now, I can hold a note for a long time.. actually I can hold a note forever.  But eventually that's just noise.  It's the change we're listening for.  The note coming after, and the one after that.  That's what makes it music.

It's the speed of the beat that's causing seizures, at least for me.

But I wouldn't trade Deena and Paul and so many others for all the tea in China, so there is a silver lining to the headspinning.

I don't suppose there's a way to just make us less easy to find?

I don't suppose there's a way to just make us less easy to find?

a) That horse has left the stable
b) That's pulling up the drawbridge, and I'm against it

But there was a time when I spoke up because I was offended (even used the word offended in my post), and I was shot down. I was not apologized to. I was told how wrong I was. And, I don’t bring this up to discuss the issue again…I’m over it. I hope everyone is over it and that it's another forgotten topic. I just bring it up as an example.

Actually, if this is the incident I'm thinking of, I have to object to your characterization of it. In the incident I recall, you expressed an opinion on why you felt the "lack of respect" many of us show the President to be offensive. People responded and explained why we felt he was owed little to no respect. And then you shut down the conversation by deleting your posts.

I’m not saying that either side was right or wrong in that situation. What I’m saying is that we never had the opportunity to get to any kind of resolution on the matter because you picked up your ball and went home. Therefore, I don’t think it’s a fair example.

So I wonder how they would have felt if we'd been "Buffista Island! New comers scary!" when they'd shown up

I can only speak for myself here. I *am* one of the people who likes Buffista Island. HOWEVER, I understand that new people are vital to an online community. I'm allowed to *feel* all tribal, but what's important is how I *act.* And I've never chased off newcomers.

I admit, I think new posters need some time to get the feel of the community, but I think that's true for any community, be it meatspace or online. If that's seen as being anti-newcomers, well, I'm not going to change my mind on that.

We're all a little worked up here, and I think it's mostly b/c we love this community and want to preserve what we've created. NOT in the Buffista Island sense, but in the *nature* of our community. Wanting to maintain the nature of our community is a GOOD thing.

I’ve been biting my virtual tongue on the “clique” issue for a while now.

I went back and reviewed the recent Schmoker controversy, and have come to the conclusion that, despite the fine rhetoric and politically correct talk, this board is just like any other.

Schmoker, in my opinion, did nothing “offensive”. His defense of his position was no more strenuous, out of bounds or persistent than a number of similar discussions by “veteran” Buffistas. And it truly disturbs me that he and others have not only felt forced to withdraw or de-lurk, but that the ire continued after their stated withdrawal and even devolved into accusations of deception and troll-hood.

I’ve seen it denied here, but the naked truth is that this community does have a distinct tendency to tell newbies “shut up and wait” in no uncertain terms. Some people have come forth and stated their preference for such an unwritten policy and patted themselves on the back for their honesty and straightforwardness. And gotten accolades in turn.

Well, that’s crap. It says “We can be rude but you can’t. We can be completely inconsiderate jerks, and you can’t say ‘boo’ about it because we’ve been here longer.” Like that’s some sort of badge of honor. To spin it another way it says “We can spend more time here because we don’t have lives or have lenient and boring jobs so we win”.

I did not spend all that much time lurking when first I was pointed to the Buffistas. I waited a couple days and jumped in. And though I don’t remember specifically what I posted, it wasn’t all happy-happy “Golly you all are swell, I wanna be just like you when I grow up, please accept me”. I’m fairly certain it was brash and brazen and probably offensive. I’ve even earned a reputation on this board for precisely that, with a sort of cackling “hee hee get Miracleman, he’ll snark so and so for us” on occasion. I have felt, in the past, a full and committed part of this community and I find that I no longer feel that way, or want to feel that way because of our repeated “shut the hell up newbie” behavior.

We’ve all stepped over the line on occasion. We’ve all been either pissy, or thought we were being funny and said something that pissed somebody else off. And, usually, a simple “Dude, what was that?” will get us to say “sorry”. But not always; there have, as I earlier mentioned, been numerous cases of a “Dude” response triggering a “Hey, wait, I’m defending my position ad nauseam” conversation that clogged the thread and made everyone nuts and not once has someone said “Maybe you should just shut up until you learn the rules”. Why? Because the posters involved have been here a while. They’re “old school” and that, evidently, gives them carte blanche to stomp the crap out of a thread with their personal issues until their fingers fall off. They weren’t told “learn the rules” and they really should have been told that or at least reminded that they should know better.

I don’t buy the “earn your place” position at all. I don’t know how many people on this board I want to smack the hell out of on a daily basis and they’re relatively new. But someone took a shine to them, or they got away with it once or twice and now they can ramble idiotically about whatever moronic subject floats their particular boat that day and there isn’t a giant brouhaha here in Bureaucracy about what the hell we should do about it. And there sure as hell aren’t accusations of trollish behavior or misrepresentation of themselves.

The Buffistas are a clique and a damnably snooty one. Some of you like it that way, some of you feel that’s just dandy. But I don’t. I think we should give new people a chance and wait for them to cross a real line before we jump all over them and make them feel unwelcome and unworthy. Schmoker had issues with our ambiguous “community standards” and that has brought that issue into specific relief. The conclusion: Our community standards are false, hypocritical and based on tenure. But that tenure is ill defined; some people can waltz in and immediately “earn” their place despite being just as annoying or grating as any newbie you can name. Why?

If we could define that, maybe a case could be made for “you belong; you don’t you rule-violator, you”. But currently there’s an unfair system of vets claiming annoyance and everyone jumping on the band-wagon so they can be in the cool kids corner.

It’s disappointing and depressing.