I've been reading and posting on this forum since.....it started! Can anyone else here claim that? Come to think of it, where are they all - LowNSlow, Rightstuffer, BEagler, and a few others I can't remember. And Hungry Pilot, who thought we shouldn't be here...who turned out not to even be a pilot. I think BEagle was in at the beginning too. Probably Genghis the Engineer too. We wanted our own forum, and despite complaints that this was a PROFESSIONAL pilots' rumour network, we finally got it.
Since then the main change I've noticed is that it's got bigger - enormously, hugely, bigger. For a while we all knew each other, but that's not really the case any more. We had fly-ins quite often, and we didn't worry too much where they were to - we just wanted to meet each other, often for the first time. And we thought this was so, so much better than the Flyer Email List, which was probably the only other similar thing around back then.
Apart from that...it goes up and down, more serious, more trivial, more or less aggressive, more or less downright bizarre. I come here less because I have less time, and because whereas back then aviation was still new and exciting for me, that isn't really the case any more. It's not that I don't still enjoy it, but in a different way. I've seen people come and go, and topics come and go and come round again, but that's normal and as it should be. Everything changes, and if it doesn't, it probably stagnates. And yes, every now and then people say that the forum isn't as good as it used to be, and that gets discussed for a while too.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose....and all that.