I’ve not been around here enough to see frequent comings and goings. Heartfelt, genuine goodbyes, I think, are always welcome. There is a big ol’ void out there. It’s good to know folks aren’t dead.
That said, I think serial leavers should have to come back with the prefix Cher- before their name, so we can easily tell them apart, expect them to leave with a flourish, and return for a last hurrah, over and over.
This too, shall be my last post in this thread. SDMB, I barely new ya!
HEY! I’m BACK!!!
OMIGOD! I missed you all! I’m sorry real life had to interfere with our little binary orgy here, but I want to thank ALL of you for being so supportive while I was gone.
Sarcasm? Is my life…
I know it’s been said before, but I view most of these type posts as simply saying goodbye to friends.
It’s not that we don’t have lives, just that we do make friendships on this and other boards. So, when we leave, we just want them to know, to have closure.
For a lot of us, it’s a community, and not all that different from our neighborhood, our church, our best-friends-from-high-school, etc. Nothing more, nothing less.
Or like leaving a party and saying goodbye to the host.
Yes, exactly that, too.
You said it better than I did and in just one sentence.
User, the fact that this is virtual doesn’t stop it from being a community. Yes, if you stick solely to General Questions, that’s not necessarily going to be evident, but if you’ve spent any time in any of the other fora, you must realize that there are real friendships (and occasional emnities) formed on this board.
If you yourself choose to invest nothing but your intellectual curiosity in this board, that’s fine. But why would you have a problem with the idea that people can actually establish friendships here? It’s not a new concept with the Internet - haven’t you ever heard of Pen Pals? When I was a kid (back in the Stone Age), these were pretty popular, and there was considerably less chance of ever meeting a Pen Pal face-to-face than it is of meeting a Doper in real life. Yet, I suspect that most particpants in Pen Pals would have certainly claimed friendship with their pals.
Why is this such a difficult concept to wrap your mind around? This board sure as hell isn’t my life, but I like it, and I like (or occasionally dislike) individuals on it. I guess my question to you would be, why wouldn’t I?
I’m not a frequent poster or well-known, so I probably wouldn’t do an “I’m leaving” thread; I’d simply drop an email to those individuals who might notice. But I can tell you that some people have (at least as far as I personally know) vanished off the board, and I have definitely wondered what happened to them. You like to know they didn’t just die, you know?
For me, if I ever chose to leave, it would be simple courtesy. I’ve been a member for almost 7 years. And although I’m not as close to the posters here as I have been to the Buffy boards that have evolved through the years, I still feel I’d owe someone an explanation for my absence. I wouldn’t want people to worry that I’d died, or something like that.
StG
Ditto. Luckily for me, my wife stayed active on the Buffy boards after I left, so most of my friends there knew what happened and didn’t worry. Like Tris, I have a post-post to be sent in the instance of my premature departure from this plain of existance. I have made some good friends on this Board…I’d hate to leave them hanging.
You know what? You pay your money, you get to post. You get to post on topics that interest you, pontificate about all the things that you know well, tell only those narratives that reflect well on you. You get to tell the funniest jokes you know, the saddest stories you’ve experienced, and all the prosaic experiences, the mediocre achievements, the inferieur mots, can be excised from your internet persona and SDMB community reputation. Everybody here gets to be better, or worse if they want, in every way, than they are when they shut off the computer and walk out the front door. That’s what the price of admission gets you.
When you leave, you get to post as big as you wish you were, to hell with whatever you may have actually been. Everybody else gets to attend your farewell party or not as they please, and a few will attend and say rude things about the host, but that’s a risk at any party, and those people rarely matter at all.
I may be in the minority, but the big reason I’m here in the first place is for the opportunity to show off, to make people notice me enough to comment upon my posts, preferably with approval. When I leave, I’ll waste no time on my detractors, if any, and I just might link to all those posts I’m still proud of that I thought drew less than enough attention. And it’ll be egocentric and boring to most of the community and draw lots of witty derision, and funny derision, and plain derision, and irritable dull derision, and foolish but well-intentioned derision, and rude stupid derision, and none of it will matter to me as much as the single compliment I might get, deserved or not, as I shut down the magic typewriter and go to bed.
In case I never post here again, assume I’m being happy and productive and start a thread about what a promising poster I was, and be sure to link to a post I made you thought was particularly funny.
The OP is refering to my post (#18) in this thread .
What Exit? is refering to post #11 of this thread, my post.
I mentioned a poster that had over 6,000 posts in their first year. What Exit? correctly guessed I was refering to him. I chose not to name the poster I was refering to, lest it seem like I was trying to be negative.
[sub]If What Exit? is a she, please insert she for he in the previous text.[/sub]
Exactly. I think after a certain point, it is only fair to say you are leaving. I have often wondered if certain posters have died when suddenly you don’t read anything from them for months on end and am happily surprised when I see them posting again.
But yes, I do see your point - sometimes there are drama queens who threaten to leave, or feel it necessary to go into a bitchfest about why they are leaving. A simple, “Farewell” would be sufficient. Plus, why burn bridges? Maybe you will change your mind in a year or two, and why go out flaming?