Quote: "#2 A lot of false or misleading advice."
As you are Old_School, a lot of the advice you were given was not false or misleading, you just didn't like it and often ignored what people had do say. You even had people with the experience and success to back themselves up too, not just 14 year old bedroom coders who think they know what they're talking about. People were often quite reasonable and patient, but you did manage to annoy people, whether the way they reacted was right or wrong, I do not know. But the advice that you were given was actually useful advice.
Quote: "I’d suggest start with setting good examples and treating everyone equal. I agree certain people do tend to annoy others more than others, but they are people and likely annoying because they are confused or need guidance."
But to be fair to you Old_School, this is a wise point. I don't think it's one that should be exclusive to mods either. As Rambo points out, mods are people too and they are also forum members, they volunteer to moderate, but at the end of the day they are just members like the rest of us and are not bound to hold themselves on a higher pedestal than everybody else, they just need to obey and enforce the forum's rules and keep things in a working order. But if you want a certain attitude, as I suggested earlier it's always good to have said attitude and people may follow suit, particularly if there's enough of you having that attitude.
But I disagree on this point:
Quote: "When I first came here years ago, the idea was the forum people would weed out the bad. Sadly the good moved on and the bad stayed behind."
The forum has always attracted a diverse crowd, the main attraction I would say is for hobbyists but also has people who are serious about a career in the game industry and even people currently working in the game industry or programming in a different job market. We've got indies here as well. People from each of these background still post, but members come and go and I know people move on to other things - some of the old members I'm still on contact with or have contacts for and I'm sure it's the same for others. It is sad to see them go but they can't spend a lifetime on a forum.
We still get newbies and people are always willing to offer them help too and I think that's a strength in our community - just head to the Dark Bassic Pro Discussion, it's extremely rare for somebody to not get an answer when they ask for help with a certain problem. Geek Culture gets heated from time-to-time, yes, but that doesn't mean the membership is weak, bear in mind also, that is only one part of the forum and only one part of the community. Perhaps you feel this way because you faced criticism yourself? I personally don't think you're completely innocent in that matter, but I admit, I think it could have been handled better.
[edit]
As I mentioned helpfulness on the forum I feel I should elaborate. The thing I love is that people will try to help and are often more than happy to share code or methods and we have our code bases where people freely offer code for others to use. Contrast to me using the Unity3D forums, if people ask for help it seems people are more worried that they're gonna steal scripts and people tend to sell code through the asset store and there is no code-snippets base on their website or forums for people to use or learn from. When a guy asked for help on coding an inventory I offered an in depth post (with examples of code & explanations, like we get here), but I was picked up on it by another because by his argument I was "working for free", hence he joked about me coming around to pain his house for free and essentially suggested it'd be a waste of my time to help freeloaders. Not his words as he was being more diplomatic and tongue and cheek than that, but it seems to be a bit of a contrast between communities.
To be honest, if somebody finds my code useful, then I'm happy. If I weren't willing to give code away freely I wouldn't post it freely.
My blog is pretty much filled with me talking about my coding techniques as and when I'm using them.
