Dianna Agron is the epitome of perfection.
Quinntology.
If you don't want to read my little backround you can skip the first paragraph.
For those of you who do not know me, I've been lurking the B.net forums since mid '04. I've had a lot of different accounts, including Bosspilks, APurpleChicken, A Talking Bunny, Kasai Kaji, Kasai, and Return of Kasai. Yes, I know, I couldn't stick with a name. I haven't played anything but the Halo games and Marathon Durandal from Bungie. If you would ask me a question about the Halo universe, I would be able to answer it as I have also read all 5 novels. But that's not important.
I have a major concern about the community as a whole. Yes, even the 7th column. When I joined back in '04 I was only 12 years old. Yes, that was young, but I instantly got hooked on some of the topics listed under various forums and the group systems. What I'm concerned about is the level of maturity and the ability to make good topics. For instance, the newer members, even some of the ones dating back to '05 are, for whatever reason, more prone to spam and flaming. This has elevated into a huge problem, it's even creeping into our beloved Septagon. Take a look around, there are a lot of threads here about the member titles, just because these newer members cannot read simple stickies or look at the first page of threads.
As for the Flood, it is getting a tiny bit better, but not too much to make a difference. In fact, one of the groups I was in mentioned another group called the New Flood. Yes, the New Flood. I thought, what the heck, I might as well join the group to see what's going on. I was shocked at the amount of flaming and hate going on there. I saw there the more well known members of the Flood posting there, it wasn't pretty. There were threads containing hate posts about certain moderators, or any specific member. And they even have Master Forum Ninjas and Forum Ninjas. They didn't even moderate actually. The level of maturity is horrible in each, how many threads has Pezza made about it again?
Don't even get me started on the Halo 3 forum. I have probably gone in there 4 or 5 times since it first came out and find it impossible to do anything because of the major spam. I may not be able to provide any details on them there, but I can guarentee you it's a headache for ther Ninjas.
As for the Files forums, they're pretty bad as well. Recently there has been some sort of group war between two screenshot groups. I laugh because just about every other post has (SP) by it to indicate that that member belongs to one of the groups. Do you know what that means to other members of that group? Bump the thread so it stays up on the front page. This isn't even including the bumping made by the thread creators and the advertising going on in a lot of the posts.
And finally, the Septagon. The Septagon has always been the forum with more intellectual threads popping up, but even that is changing now. Sure there are members who still go here regularly and make better threads, but it's starting to decline. I'm sure the Ninjas can agree with me that the Septagon needs more moderating now then it did before.
I would just like to express my concerns about Bungie.net to hopefully get some of you to recognize that if we as a community don't do something fast, there won't be a communtity much longer. The Bungie Online team is doing all they can to make the site better and we are just throwing it back into their faces. There is too much spam, flaming, and just stupid threads in general. I mean come on, when you to a video game site to figure out how to ask a girl out that's pretty sad.
Sorry for my little rant there, but I think that people need to start posting and thinking smarter.