Over the winter period it has become more evident that the forum have gone a little downhill with points I wish to list:
1. a consistent derailment of threads, a pivotal example occurring only within this last few hours, where a long time user vendayn spamming pornographic imagery amongst other questionable statements on multiple threads, thankfully resulting in his swift ban, with further consequences hopefully soon to ensue. This was the most extreme example of such, though other notable examples include the derailment of the multispecies ant colonies thread by a number of users offering no relevant points for conversation and instead making unfunny jokes, this leading into my second point.
2. the seemingly constant ignorance of forum mechanics and 'etiquette', there have been a number of threads relating to simple questions that could be cleared up by searching up the desired question, or posts that are just seemingly a mile away from the common standard of quality held for the forum e.g.:
In this case the individual in question was being corrected on their grammar and their lack of cohesion in their original post, reasonable enough, though the individual instead of making corrections based on those suggestions, they deleted the original topics context arguably making the topic irrelevant. This seemed like a case where the individual in question was too young and therefore immature to comprehend the extent of his/her actions. However, it is still unreasonable to assume it necessary to delete an entire topics context simply for the sake of your own hubris. Another pivotal example being the aforementioned vendayn deleting all of his previous journals over a reasonable request to see some photos, then proceeding to spam 1 star on every topic or member that was present, at least which he acknowledged( though that seems to have been in vain in hindsight).
one cannot and should not erase the past purely for their own benefit.
The decline over the past few months as been a sad one to say the least, though I find it hard to believe this years quality of threads during winter has been any different to the previous, and it is most likely with more people at home at the moment. younger or newer members having nothing better to do than browse the forum all day, creating the odd post, not always the most useful, and the older members are paying more attention to it and therefore noting it as a decline, myself included.
there are quite simple solutions to these issues:
-if you have a question or are unsure of how a feature of the forum works - search it up; there is even an entire section dedicated to forum support.
-before posting a new topic - why not check if there is a pre-existing one that you could comment on before, and use a bit of common sense on whether a topic is relevant or not i.e: 'is this something that could be searched up' & 'do people really need this at the moment?'
-if you just want to have casual conversation with other individuals or only need to speak with one other individual, why not just private message them, or if you are old enough, join discord, there are plenty of antkeeping discords like, ants and antkeeping, ant keeping and ethology, AntsDakota discord server etc.
-if you agree with someone about a particular post, just like the post, and if you want to elaborate on it further just apply common sense to ensure your own post is relevant and useful.
-grammar check - this can sound like a bit of a nitpicky one for sure, but it is very helpful to properly consider your spellings and sentence structure, especially in an ant forum where taxon names are used frequently.
To finalise this little rant, it is not my desire to bring hate to any of the individuals I have referenced and wish for people to simply see this as constructive criticism to learn from and to help improve the quality of formiculture, this was the place that really inspired me to take detail of the smaller things in life, I hope that others will be able to do the same. If anyone else has anything they would like to add, or dispute any of my points, feel free to do so.
updated the darkling beetle sandbox example in point with another far more prominent example, that should complement this point a bit more fairly.
Edited by Fatatoille, February 10 2021 - 3:08 AM.
