Originally Posted by
dook
It's not "our new tradition".
It just makes a mockery of the spirit of the thread and serves no purpose.
Much more of this garbage and I'm sure I'm not the only one who won't participate in what used to be intuitive and fun threads.
Oh, the irony…
The rules of this thread were changed by the mods because they needed to be changed. I’m not a mod, nor do I personally know any mod or owner of this website. Having said that, many of us who were regular viewers and/or players of the original “Aerodromes” thread in the early to mid-2000’s had become disillusioned when the tone of the thread changed. Those changes fell into two areas, one of which the mods are trying to address with the new time limits.
Sometime in 2017 the laid back, patient, friendly environment came under assault from some people (very few people, but that’s all it takes to spoil any sport…). Those new players didn’t seem to understand or care about the long established and very successful rules (written and unwritten) that had resulted in a large number of regulars, along with drop-ins from all areas of the globe, posting photos, making guesses, giving clues, etc
. as a leisure activity, to be enjoyed over a period of days – or even weeks sometimes.
Because those new folks happened to be from the UK, the thread was hurried along during UK waking hours, which is fine, but when the rest of the world was asleep those (few) wide-awake, aerodrome thread addicted folks in Jolly Olde put more and more pressure on to speed things up. Some of us (those non-UK or Western Europe people) posted a few comments or suggestions to slow down – and exchanged PMs of course about the new tone of the thread. But it seems a (very) few people were truly obsessed with sitting at their screens somewhat akin to a Labrador Retriever prancing and pawing until someone throws the ball again. That compulsivity is the first factor that slowly but surely drove so many regulars away.
I am trying very hard to “play the ball not the man” as the mods rightly insist but I will add a statistic to make my point: One of the people who was (overly) active set a record on the aerodromes thread for the most posts
on any forum on pprune -- in a week, in a month and in a year! – all on a forum intended to be a leisure activity.
So, here is why (I think) the mods took action: (This is a quote from a PM I sent to a fellow ppruner back in mid-2019) “It's morning in the UK, the middle of the night in western North America, and bed time here in Asia; we've lost out on another day of enjoying and participating in what used to be the best thread on PPRUNE. Thanks to the passive / aggressive behaviour of one of the regulars, it's become a less than pleasant place, where it's either "hurry, hurry, post something, post something!" -- just because that person is in need of something to do at that very moment and doesn't understand, or perhaps doesn't care, about the nature of a global forum -- or it's a dead quiet place for 12 hours because it's night time for the forum addict.”
If everyone understood the reasons for the rules we all tacitly agreed to – and abided by those simple rules – this could still be one of the best little gems on the internet.
The second reason that contributed to previous regulars abandoning the forum was the antagonistic tone that has grown over the past several years. It seems some people don’t understand when a word or phrase is an ethnic or racial slur. Perhaps they live an insular life and honestly don’t realise that words that were acceptable when they were schoolboys or young men are offensive, hurtful and, of course, unnecessary.