Originally Posted by Blitzeen
(Post 5680959)
It's changed so many times while I've been here...
When I joined, it was really tame on here. Threads would get locked if people had differing opinions, never mind arguing :laugh: but things were very civil and I'd say the forum population consisted of much older members. I was 13 when I joined and I think I was probably the youngest regular member on here apart from Corkie. Then there was the rise of a clique of users who had it out for me/lily/Kizwiz/Legend/Tanser Man and they were obsessed with Paris Hilton and were really bitchy and caused a lot of arguments on the forum and I left for a while because of it.
By 2007 the forum regulars were on average a lot younger, mostly teenagers, and there were constant arguments. The Zeta vs Brotherhood thing sparked up and I didn't really fit in with either crowd due to the previous tension with the Paris Hilton gang but I was friends with lily and then Shaun and Darenn who posted in the Zeta thread so I guess I was more in line with them. I started to get to know members my own age (Shaun, Darenn, Billy, Ross) and eventually started using MSN with other members but then had a ridiculous argument with Ross one day over my grandfather's nationality :laugh: which pissed me off beyond belief so I blocked all TiBBers on MSN and stopped posting in chat threads for a while.
When I eventually calmed down (like, months later) I became friends with what became my defining TiBB friendship group - Shaun, lily, Jen, LemonJam, Dezzy, Rory, MrGaryy, MarkWaldorf and sometimes Darenn. People slowly dropped off TiBB and I'm not as close to some of them as I once was but at that time I think we sort of migrated away from the forum for the most part and stopped being involved in the arguments that took place on the forum.
The crazy fighting in 2010-2011 was pretty stressful from a moderator point of view and we were constantly dealing with stupid fights. I stand fully behind each of the bans that were handed out at that time because it doesn't matter how much the people may have changed - it doesn't excuse the stupid things they did at the time. When I think back to what Tommy and Stephanie did to Kerry, for example, it makes me so angry, especially now that she's sadly no longer with us... and I liked them both as members, I just don't think it's acceptable to post other people's personal pictures or save them to your computer and brag about it or try and use it to blackmail people. I would be extremely angry if Stacey was ever allowed to return.
I think the rise of the chat threads kind of took all of the tension out of the forum but it's also made it more difficult to make friends... you're kind of expected to pick one chat thread and stick with it because that's what other people have done, and if you find that you get on well with one member then you're going to post where they post... hopefully in the future we'll just have one chat thread rather than two separate ones, but that might add more arguments... I've noticed in recent months that there are a lot of new members taking sides in conflicts that have been on-going long before they joined which I don't think is very healthy, it seems like there will be a lot more conflict in the future too.
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