I'm not so upset that I'm going to leave the site or boycott the marketplace, but I do miss the OT Forum already. It was a fun place to shoot the hay, share entertaining links, and yes, debate everything under the sun. I know that Spike has cited personal attacks, and I don't deny that there was too much of that, but again, disciplinary measures to deal with the small minority of hotheads are already in place. Punishing the many for the sins of the few is a sure-fire way to breed resentment. More to the point, it's apparent that many people, myself included, suspect that the real reason the forum was deleted is that the arguments about religion were offensive to the site owners and/or staff. Not a conspiracy theory, just IMO a realistic assessment of possibility. Spike's suggestion regarding potentially off-limits topics would seem to support this. Regardless of whether this is true or not, the main thing is that even the generally well-behaved among us were deprived of an attractive feature of this community. (You don't mind if I call it a community, do you?)

As I ranted at another site last night, some people who weren't regular partiticipants at the OT forum are attacking the regulars who are upset, and mischaracterizing the content and character of the discussions that occurred while the forum existed. If you're strictly speaking of the religion thing, you have my agreement to some extent. The attacks went too far, no question, and the whole thing was a distasteful turn-off for me. But while I didn't participate in those threads, I did see people making a case for discussing such things in a more civil manner. It's not like everyone there was being disrespectful or "hateful."

It's really strange how a couple of members appear to be hell-bent on keeping that forum dead and mischaracterizing its participants, even though they didn't participte there very much. If you don't like a forum, don't go there. Live and let live.
On a more positive note, I got to edit this post! Thank you for this feature, it'll be great for people like me who type way too quickly.

Message edited on: 05/14/2004 12:08