Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
It seems an uncharacteristic move for him, and I think that it's completely sad to throw away several months of community just because of one bad experience in a thread.

It's a very uncharacteristic move for me, which is why this is my first (and hopefully only) YAGE. But I don't feel like I'm throwing away several months of community. It is, in fact, that I can't participate in this forum as a community that I am withdrawing.

Once I get comfortable at a message board, I feel like participating more in the general community - and not simply in the main topic (in this case, Star Wars). I like there to be a sense of actual community and comraderie. I don't like hostility. And while I don't expect individual members to rise to my maidenhood defense when I am unjustly attacked, I expect moderators to be around once in a while to see to that task. Because if a message board community is unmoderated, it WILL attract trolls and creeps.

So ... to me, an unmoderated message board community is no community at all. It's not that Rob or stinky dinkens are dickheads; it's that they are allowed to be so continuously. (And I did give 14-year-old WeShallPreserve a pass - - - note that I quoted nothing of him in my initial YAGE post, and my advice directed to him in this thread has been civil and respectful).

I'm sorry to be leaving ... but I can't continue here just posting about Star Wars alone. It gets old. With no more Star Wars on the horizon, it gets old fast. And, as I've posted before, I figured Star Wars talk to die completely once the upcoming 40th anniversary is over.

And so, I really had a desire to branch out into the larger community of general discussion. As a staunch liberal progressive, I am perfectly willing to exchange viewpoints and ideas with the majority conservative members. And perhaps if Rob and Stinky were trolls who did not post every two minutes to viciously and personally attack me after every single post I make, this would not have been that big a deal to me. I had fun dissing them back for 24 hours, but that's it. I don't want to be part of a community where I must deal with such immature hostility on a constant basis, if I want to discuss anything besides Star Wars.

And while I did have qualms about quid-pro-quo-ing by claiming Rob was gay, I personally am not responsible for him considering that an insult. I don't think there's anything wrong with being gay, and I did not call him a fag or a queer or anything of the sort. But, in my experience, anyone that homophobic is classically closet gay. I used a descriptive term and not an insult. The fact that Rob might take it as an insult is merely a part of his neurosis. But his personal problems do not make "gay" an insult. It's simply not.

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