Larry L wrote:
A survey of both the number and the quality of posts to ROFF has confirmed
what many have suspected for many months.

ROFF is officially in an intellectual recession.

"It seems as people have just stopped investing mental capital in the ROFF
market place. Long years of fear developed as nearly ever investment has
met with down spiraling nastiness seem to have caused people to move to
other markets, or simply bide their time hoping for improvement before
risking further capital." said a source that wishes to remain anonymous.





Some things are more or less inevitable, once such a trend develops, it
is likely to continue in a descending spiral. Once people lose interest
in countering it, mainly because their efforts are ineffectual at best,
or because they see no point in fighting it anyway, or indeed any
effective way to actually do so, the spiral tightens until the trend
reaches its conclusion. Many people also simply lose interest as the
spiral tightens downwards, and thus tighten the spiral even further.
This of course accelerates the trend.

You can **** off all the sensible people some of the time, and some of
the sensible people all of the time, but the nature of such a spiral
ensures that you will eventually **** of all the sensible people for all
time.

In this particular case, nobody, apart from a few individuals externally
affected as a result of nastiness overflowing from ROFF, actually loses
much, there are plenty of excellent alternatives to ROFF, most
especially for interested anglers, and it is a good sign really that
sensible people eventually eschew nastiness completely, realising as
they do that it is completely contra-productive.

Anything worth saving would have saved itself.

What many people also realise too late in a loose configuration of
individuals such as ROFF was, is that personal attacks and general
nastiness are not simply attacks on individuals, but in fact attacks on
the configuration itself. Even tightly knit configurations can not
withstand such inside pressure for long.

TL
MC