'Twas a very wise man indeed who originally said these words. They are widely applicable to many things in life, though they do seem especially true of the BEA: I was forced to reflect upon them when I went to the User Gallery the other day. I haven't been there for a long time, as I felt there was just too much (largely off-topic) rubbish to sort through in order to get to the good stuff. However, I was tipped-off that there would be something there of interest to me, so I went. To my dismay, things were at least as bad as they had ever been. Indeed, almost half the pics in the User Gallery at that time were posted by our most infamous UG flooder (Alicia), and as only a few of these were finished morphs and none were morph requests, the non-morphed pics were all off-topic, no matter how you choose to define the term. (It would seem that Alicia's 'promise' of restraint after the last fiasco was very short-lived, as with the promise before that and the promise before that ad nauseum). I say this in spite of my stated position (in my original BEHAVIOR article) that what constitutes off-topic at the BEA is almost impossible to determine; this is one of the few cases where it definitely can be.

Ah yes -- my first BEHAVIOR article. Remember that? I put forth an almost universally agreed-upon solution to the above problem with the UG. But did the owner do anything about it? I guess my opening paragraph has already answered that. At the time he was touting that every one would soon have to register in order to post to the BEA, which appeared to be his stated solution to the problem. However, the registration has already been implemented, and guess what -- it only applies to the forum. This does indeed appear to have resolved the past abuse of the forum, but the abuse of the UG continues -- and the resolution of this problem in the forum has come at a very high price.

In spite of the odd abusive post, I liked the old forum. The interface was just so simple, clear and elegant. Not only could I see every thread, but every response within a thread -- very often, despite not having any interest in the original post, I picked up on one later on in the thread. Now, I cannot see the responses unless I open the original post. Even worse, once I do so it is impossible to determine exactly which post in the thread any given person is responding to. Unlike the old forum, the responses are not threaded, and the post you are responding to is not quoted. Also, when somebody posts a new response to an old thread, it is moved up the list in front of newer threads, making it difficult to see exactly what is a new thread. The new forum does have a few flashy new features, but the above problems are so fundamental that the new software has failed in its job before it has even started, IMHO. Hence, not only do I no longer visit the UG, but I hardly ever visit the forum anymore either (it is fortunate that a friend of mine e-mailed me about a recent request related to my last BEHAVIOR article, or else I would never have known about it).

I know that the BEA owner is exactly that -- the owner of BEA -- but what would he have if nobody visited or contributed to his site? Certainly not anything worthwhile. Yet he seems content to ignore the opinions of many valued BEA contributors, and when he does change something, what was already working perfectly well gets screwed up. There is no reason we couldn't have kept the old forum if the registration was applied across the entire site, as was originally supposed to have been the case -- and this may well have resolved the abuse of the UG at the same time. If not, then there's always the idea put forward in my original BEHAVIOR article to consider, or indeed many others that have been put to the owner in the past. Yet he seems content to ignore all of this, and just let the BEA's visitors and contributors slowly become completely pissed off. The abuse of the old forum would not have been anywhere near as severe as it was if the issues that divided us had been resolved. The owner has both the power and (courtesy of the BEA's contributors) the ideas to tackle these problems head on. So why doesn't he? Will he answer my plea this time, or just ignore it as he did my first BEHAVIOR article and the many other worthy suggestions that have been put to him in the past? Does he even read his site's own newspaper? Let's see what transpires this time, if indeed anything actually does.