The loss of knowledge

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I have to agree with much of what's been said on the subject of time (real and imaginary). My opinion is that if a topic's worth discussing it's worth discussing well; so that I feel obliged to put in something articulate and fairly in-depth if I join a sensible thread; but these posts can take anything up to an hour and a half from initial conception to finished article and that's just one post on one of many threads. Like a lot of those members who have careers to get on with, I don't have a great deal of spare time, so that the Downs has to take its turn with all the other interests and obligations that demand my attention, which is why I sometimes ghost for weeks at a time. I'm sure that a lot of other people are in the same boat.

Having said that, before the new rules came into place there were occasions when I just couldn't be bothered to wade through the reams of "What's your favourite blade of grass in Middle-earth?" threads (mainly conducted in some sort of degraded version of pidgin English) in search of the merest hint of an original or interesting thought, but that again comes down to time and how much of it I have to spend: "CBE*," as Bernard Woolley once said. "Can't be everywhere"

Obviously those are only my reasons, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they apply to quite a few people, not to mention those that lindil mentioned, who simply can't spare us any time at all and have dropped out forever. It's sad that those whose time is least plentiful are often those whose posts are most worth reading, but that's life. With a few notable exceptions, I don't think that we can blame their departure or prolonged absence on any particular demographic changes on the boards. I think that we should bear that in mind and see how effective the new measures are before talking about application e-mails. After all, we don't know who'd be frightened off by any additional registration hurdles and those people might not turn out to be those whom we intended to deter.

* Alternatively and more usually "Commander of the Order of the British Empire"