As the rebuilding of ECTOs progresses, I think it's high time to end the "separate eras" thing by merging the freshly-started newer ECTOs category and the older threads being archived (ie. the "old era"). It's time to stop "starting anew" and get back to the resumption of the guild as it was and as it's always been. ECTOs is ECTOs. One guild, one era. We are who we are, and we've been around for a long time. Over the year and a half that these forums have existed, they have been active as hell. No need to hide most of that away, no matter how less relevant some of those older discussions may be. It's time to let the newer community members see where we've come from to reach the present day.


Over the next couple of days I am going to move back most of the archived ECTOs threads into the main forums. It's going to take a few days because I have to weed out some of the serious drama threads and keep them locked away. What's in the past re: any of that shit stays in the past, forever. (I may end up just outright deleting the drama crap for good.) Some of the older 'policy' style threads will be rewritten and reposted to reflect the current time.

In the meantime, if you see really old threads appear in the list, feel free to read them but please don't necro bump them unless there's a VERY good reason for it.

I've already moved back all of the old ECTOs recruitment app threads into the main Recruitment forum. I've started to go through the Matters Of ECTOs Archives, but I want to make sure I don't bring out some of the negative/drama-laced threads by accident, so rather than just moving all of them at once, I have to manually check each thread one by one and move it.

What about keeping the drama crap as well? Just for histerical raisins. It's part of the history, albeit not the sunny side, but it's still part of the past. I don't think anyone reads them now. Might be useful for the guild history. I know it's icy terrain, but the drama is already over.

That was an intended pun :-)

I've read through the drama threads last week. It's indeed pretty messy.

What's so secretive about the meh formation? :-P

PS: If I don't show up for several days after this post, you know that Steve's thugs got me.

LOL Peter.

Sometimes the past should stay in the past. I am not trying to hide that fact that in the past I have come off as a raging "insert bad word here" ... but it could also rehash things for those who may or may not know better than to reply... absent minded to an old thread or bring it up else where... I am sure I won't have a problem listening to that garbage since I don't get on ya alls vent to avoid that drama from resurfacing even though I'd love to talk to a few of you again... but I dont know if others really want that type of thing brought back up.. then again others may enjoy a good bashing on someone else fest... (just saying not trying to start anything.)

Hey, we all do things that others think might be crazy from time to time, but there's always a good reason at the time to do them. People have differences of opinion about issues. If we didn't, we wouldn't be human. We wouldn't be free thinkers. And we sure as hell wouldn't get pissed off when people didn't see things our way because we would all be thinking the same way to begin with! Lol There's a saying that I try to remember, though I know in conflicting times I've forgotten it, which goes, "If you think you know what someone else is means, you're wrong." I think it's a pretty simple interpretation, but, no matter what you think, you cannot even fathom how someone sees a situation, as you do NOT have the history within their life to actually know how they see it. You do not share their memories, nor their background, nor how they reacted to what they've done and seen in life, and therefore you cannot ever think you know what someone means, or how someone feels. Not exactly anyway.

Anyway, just because it's part of the history doesn't mean a can of worms needs to be opened, I say.

Most of the little things that happened along the way honestly weren't anything that would detract a newcomer from wanting to stick around for the long-term. Disagreements happen from time to time, and I certainly don't want to pave over every little piece of our not-so-shining past. We are who we are, and we are human. We have still been one of the best PvE guilds in all of Guild Wars' existence. Probably 99% of the archived topics will be unarchived. It's just that 1% pertaining to all of that end fighting really would most likely give newcomers the wrong impression about us, and especially what we aim to reflect going forward, which is why I have decided to DELETE all of that stuff and never mention it again unless it's part of a retrospective (such as that guild history idea). I mean, hell. Even the archives are a mess with all of that stuff there. It's a real eyesore to look at even just the listings of thread titles.


The main thing that discourages me from deleting mass amounts of material, no matter how worthless, is that it lowers our total forums post count. Oh well. That stuff needs to go. And it will. It will be replaced in time with newer, better vibe-giving, content.

All done. Deleted all of the in-fighting crap, from the ECTOs archives anyway. (meh/Onyx drama is still archived in full. Not my concern at the moment.) Because of the deletions, some of which were random threads that were really too full of vitriol to keep around, we lost around 900 posts from our overall forums post count. We'll just have to get working to replace those posts with newer threads. I also finally got around to deleting the little-used secret Party-Hardy Getaway forum and all of its posts within. Not necessary anymore to have that lying around.


From now on, we won't archive anything unless it's serious drama that we need to get out of the public eye.




And all of a sudden the ECTOs category looks "lived in" again.