Yeah it’s unfair! I want a special moderators secret places tour with highlights and a dream dinner (with candles and viewpoint and clothes on the table) and then karaoke with 
!and belly dance from north west Europe
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We mostly talk about how annoying all these users are, and what a peaceful site it would be if everyone was banned.
Oh, and we occasionally ban @Eugene
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First, I don’t know how old you are, so pls accept my apology for this sermon 
I am 63 now.
In less than four weeks the above statement will be false.
I have, often in my life, thought, “I am like that”, only to find out the next day, that it wasn’t “being” (like in “I am”) but rather doing, or not doing, because something had changed—no, NOT “something”—that I have changed, changed what I was doing or not doing.
Have I now changed, or am I still the same? Huge meta-question, that.
… as said above, I do not know about you.
But I believe that we DO change, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, sometimes we notice, sometimes we don’t, at least not immediately.
Just a personal example: my life has changed very suddenly almost two months ago. I never believed it could happen, or happen that way. And again, it is not “my life” that has changed, it was me who changed something I did or didn’t do: I adopted an old dog from a shelter, and all over sudden I walk—HAVE to walk— 4–6 km per day. Suddenly I need to prepare food regularly, not just when I feel hungry (I lived alone for almost all of my adult life). Suddenly I’m afk for long times. My life of the past ~25 years … changed, by me, and, of course, by Jasper (aka Siddhartha Wowtama), to give him his due credit.
I still smoke, I still stay up too long, yes, but … I also see how some changes pull other changes behind them.
I guess all I want is to express that, IMHO, a statement like “I am like that” or “too old to change [something]” is a self-restricting statement.
Like, if I speak out something like that, my “inner child” will hear it through my mouth, which is the mouth of “a trustworthy person” (at least for my inner child), and thus there’s a good chance that my inner child will believe those words and even try to MAKE them true, and thus make me suffer from “psychosclerosis” (hat tip to my late father for this term, he was a doctor and psychotherapist), a psyche that has hardened, become rigid and stiff where it should be supple and elastic, adapting to changed circumstances and insights.
One thing might never change though: that I sometimes feel “triggered” to write a GREAT WALL OF TEXT (forgive me). But wait … oh well, I know it WILL change some day
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That’s strange. Are you sure you click the specific arrow? It’s a bit confusing sometimes. And you can check before posting too you have the recipient writen on the top when you write your answer (like I have Conrad_Melville with your logo just now)
Edit: funny it’s not an answer to you! Maybe because of the citation?
Yes, It used to happen a lot, then it went away. Recently, it has done this to me again two or three times. I’m quite sure I clicked right in the referenced link above. I can’t remember whether this instance had the logo or not. Anyway, it’s pretty minor in the great scheme of things.
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I never noticed that there was such a thing to be honest. It seems to me that a club that is very easy to get in to, doesn’t have any exclusivity downsides or upsides.
As far as I am concerned the best forum I’ve ever been and enjoyed (now gone since 2007) had a super-exclusive board section for “serious discussion” (politics, science, religion, you name it) and you really had to be invited by an administrator/mod to get in there. If and only if they deemed that you could handle the heat and behave. If not, then out you went again.
A lot of people wanted in, so they had something to strive for. It was a good incentive to strive for something better. And once in, you didn’t want to be out, so it was also a good incentive to stay positive and contribute and write in a fair and calm way. In many walks of life having an exclusive reward down the line, is actually something that works good for most people involved.
The only long-term downside I’ve ever found to this idea is that now all those very good posts and discussions cannot even be accessed even through the “wayback machine”. You had to be logged in and thus they are now all gone - apart from some very nice topics that I kept in my personal backup.
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This is exactly what I find most important about having that area for ‘regulars’. I have posted some private things there that I would never post in the public section of this forum (or in public on any social network), but that I wanted to share only with those users who also have been around here for a while.
+1
Because there were too many gardening posts on another thread. That’s why. And “secret garden” just sounds so much better than without the ‘secret’. 
Isn’t that obvious?
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