The white-on-nearly-white quote boxes are nearly impossible for this "old man's" eyes to parse.

And I'm all for local democratic processes, but these new smilies would not have gotten my vote. We didn't have a say via galciv2.com, so I guess WC is the Stardock analog to Washington, DC and we're just a weird little county in a small state somewhere?

Too bad, now I'm hoping people stop using htem, they're just too disruptive.

The slide of these forums from what they were to what they are now can be seen on an almost daily basis. But this is probably the wrong place to discuss this. I blame the cross posting involved with the sharing of the Impulse forum and this very Off Topic forum across sites with widely different interests.

This has brought an influx of a few folks that add interest and otherwise seem to be decent folks. But more often than not have brought in a whole bunch of folks with which I have nothing in common and frankly have no desire to associate with.

Yes it's obvious that the GalCiv2 site is in decline but this decline is being unnecessarily hastened by all this Impulse/OFT stuff.

Probably it would be better if the old GalCiv2 folks would try and ignore the Impulse/OFT and stick just to GalCiv2 related threads. I know that's a difficult thing to ask because these two forums are like a train wreck that is both disgusting and impossible to ignore.

I'm probably going to continue to ignore my own advice because it seems to me that the Impulse supporters can't bear the thought that not everyone on the planet loves Impulse. As long as there is at least one dissenter they feel compelled to stifle all source of criticism. I intend to be that dissenter until the point Brad sees fit to ban me for simply holding a contrary opinion. But given the current state of these forums being banned is probably a better fate than the long slow gradual death that appears to be inevitable.

I will miss what we used to have though.