[Boudica]

There are so many posts in this thread that I want to reply to but since there's so many I won't. I've left a simple like for those of you who said something that seemed really significant and true.

I keep hearing mention of this "good old days" thing, as if the forum was more active in the past. It most certainly wasn't. However, the members and their interests were different in the early days. I would say many of us certainly "hung out" more outside of the forum and several members were very active in their interests, whereas as now we hear less about individual achievements and projects. However, that is the nature of growth. Parts of it are less personal, in the sense that not everyone knows each other's business. Forgive me for a terrible analogy, but SL reminds me of a city. In it's early beginnings it had a lot of character and people were close and very technical, but now the 'city' has grown we are getting a lot more variety in the people and interests we see. We don't know all the neighbours that live on the street (or in the sub-forum), but we are still part of a dynamic and interesting community.