Hey gang! Just wanted to drop by to mention a few things.
I started visiting wotc when I was 16, way back in 2003, and I finally made an account and started posting in the vintage forum in 2005. I was promptly mocked by team ABS into oblivion, and probably would have left if not for Doug Linn and glenchuy and a few ABSers such as Supa_Tim who were kind enough to convince me that I should stay. Eventually I got in pretty tight with the Vintage community, although it started to die off over the next few years, and today it has been pretty much dead for about 2-3 years at least. The fact that the entire wotc forum is pretty much dead at this point is a reality. Most of the magic formats have most recent posts that are days if not weeks old (months, in the case of vintage,) instead of minutes or seconds, like we would expect. What posts there are have been made by a very small number of users.
Am I happy wotc is dead? Of course not. I would say that they did this to themselves, so I am happy that most users were not willing to stick around and put up with it, but I'm not happy they are dead. Or perhaps more accurately: I am not happy that there was a need for them to die, but since the need arose, I'm glad it happened? I'm not sure how to phrase it.
In any case, this brings me to my point: I like giving Monica a hard time as much as anyone, but please please please be careful about the kinds of posts you make on wotc going forward. I absolutely understand wanting to bring new users to this forum, and making sure no one gets left out. You guys have a really tight community, and that's a great thing. But after the redirection to NGA thread was initially closed, and then the one after that, even though there was nothing really disrespectful in the thread aside from the mere fact of its existence, I don't want to misrepresent NGA as a site that is stealing members from anyone else. That could give us a bad reputation.
You know and I know that wotc did this to themselves, and we created a new site in the void they themselves created. But they might see it as an insult, a violation of their terms of use, or even a problem that was scaused specifically by NGA, as absurd as that sounds, and they have the legal resources to make my life personally very difficult if they become so inclined.
Now, this doesn't mean you can't discuss this site anywhere else, but I think that we need to be careful not to alienate any big sites such as wotc, mtgs, enworld, and similar sites. If you really want to share NGA with everyone, probably the easiest way to do so is to simply edit your signature to include a link here and maybe a small blurb. This won't violate most sites' terms of service (although of course you should check to be sure,) and it will give a ton of visibility, depending on how prolific a poster you are or have been on that other site.
Finally, please remember that it is possible for a post to be flaming even if it is directed at someone who is not a user on this site (in this case, wotc in general.) I don't think anyone in this thread has earned a warning, but let's try to keep things civil and make sure it doesn't come to that. Complaining is still okay, though!
Thanks,
Sarah