I think that most of the older users miss Harold very much. Regardless of his modding work, the atmosphere alone that he provided... I mean you can really feel it when reading older posts in forum, dude was RESPECTED!
I do agree, that for new users to come in and hang around, there must be encouraging environment, and toxic attitude towards newbies can kill community very fast, so probably tone shift was needed, but still, from perspective of regular, senior users those new upstart a-holes must be very annoying to deal with. That was probably Harold`s greatest quality - he never shied away from a fight, he was relentless, principal, pragmatic, full of energy to take anyone on and make them heel, armed with irrefutable logic, impressive vocabulary, sense of righteousness and will to mercilessly use it all when push came to shove...well come to think of it - it does sound like an a-hole a bit...But if it is used in the line of duty, one can only respect that and you sometimes need to fight evil with evil... It is truly my belief that most of the large scale grief in the world is not because of the religion, nationality, politics, jews, muslims, liberals or whatever (I can feel the ban hammer rising
) but just people in general being a-holes, plain and simple - selfish, unrepentant, disrespectful, egoistical, narcistic, unapologetic, arrogant, ignorant a-holes... But GRF is not our complicated world, this is fairly straightforward community with clear purpose, with little room for interpretation what should or should not be allowed here...so if someone would want to weed out said a-holes from his domain? If you have an authoritarian regime, the best way is just to confront them... well Harold did it beautifully... He embodied the rules and the respect for the board in such an impressive way that I have not seen on any other board I have been part of...
Then, on the other hand, he would have probably already banned me a few times... So maybe reverence for the memory of Harold is better than the real thing
I am sorry, though, for using shortened term "a-holes", both here and in the other thread, I am not being disrespectful or trying to break forum rules, It is just that with English not being my first language I can`t think of a better term to express what I mean, too many movies I guess....