Post #607211 by klockwork on Sun, Sep 18, 2011 10:46 AM

So this thread has me a little torn. It sucks to see a regular contributor get fed up and leave, but on some level I understand it because I come onto Tiki Central to feed my love of mid century poly-pop. While I feel like I am in the same boat as VampiressRN in that I will probably never be a Tikibrainiac, I still want to learn about Tiki as much as I can on here – new or old. When I want to learn about other things that I’m into I go to other related forums and I only want those things to cross over onto Tiki Central if it makes sense. If a thread doesn’t belong here then I would hope that the poster would be notified, educated and if applicable the thread removed. If their posts about Jimmy Buffett keep getting taken down they'll get the picture.

However, I also sympathize with phenix76. I signed up for a TC account 6 or 7 years ago when I found these forums. I was really excited to find a core community of people who were focused on documenting the mid-century Tiki movement. But when I started reading the forums on a daily basis, more often than not I found that there seemed to be this hardcore clique of know-it-alls berating new posters rather than actually educating or politely correcting them about things in which they weren’t as well versed. After a while I just stopped posting and became a lurker for a long time again. I know that this stuff is typical with every forum because people feel safe behind their screen name pseudonym, but the way I always look at it is that I have to deal with enough BS in my normal day and I don’t have a lot of free time, so when I have time to relax and do what I love I like it to be focused on the topic at hand and be as ego free and drama free as possible.

I hear people saying that everyone needs to be tougher on here and get rid of the ‘to each his own’ attitude. And on the one hand I agree – TC needs to stay Tiki and that needs to be policed because if newcomers see posts about reggae in the music section and ‘this great new teriyaki burger at Carl’s Junior’ in the food section they are never going to understand what Tiki is. But on the other hand, I think that this community needs to be willing to accept new people and their initial ignorance or misinformation at the start or else it will just become an old boys club (pardon the phrase ladies) and at some point without new blood to keep things fresh it will wither and die.

All-in-all we should all just enjoy talking about what we love - whether its in a new post or an old post. If someone didn’t use search or didn’t find what they were looking for in a search (which has happened to me in the past) then a simple ‘Hey we actually happen to have a thread about that here: ______’ is a much better way of correcting them than ‘It looks like the new guy doesn’t understand the search feature!’

Tiki people are some of the most fun, creative and inviting people to hang around at bars and events – I’m not sure why that doesn’t always transfer over once everyone gets on here.