Hah, this thread is going stronger than ever lately! Nice.
You know something I miss about this place, and the era it belonged to? Back in those days, on the "message forum" model, you would compose your piece, post it (thoughtfully, one hopes!), and move on to another thread, or step away entirely and go about your other business of the day. And you'd come back a few hours or even days later, and if you were lucky there'd be some interesting replies. No "likes," no instant gratification. Just old-fashioned text: Your reward for a good or interesting post would be interesting replies from other people. Today that kind of engagement is far from the norm. Social media has made most folks a lot more passive in the way they interact with each other. (Not a dig; I like social media; but it's not the same at all.)
Like Radical_Dreamer said upthread, I've never seen another message forum culture like this one, before or since. More than half my friends today are Compendium alumni of one stripe or another. I've earned thousands of dollars as a writer and artist from people I met here directly or indirectly. The Compendium even got me laid--a whole relationship that lasted several years! This was the place where I changed people's minds (not an easy thing to do!), honed my skills of writing and debate, and fleshed out many details in my worldview. I wasn't as active of a poster as ZeaLitY or as committed to updating every facet of the Chronoverse as he was, and I was not easy to get along with if you got in my way (I'm better about that nowadays, in my mid-30s, than I was as a young 20-something), but I was one of the most substantive posters here, and it felt really good to belong to a community where I was part of the core glue. I've only had that experience a couple times in my whole life, and it's really something.
Time passes, seasons change. I've had some high highs and low lows, myself, and I bet some of you have too. There's no going back to the golden era of the Compendium. I'm actually a little surprised (if relieved) the Compendium is even still online at all. I suppose we owe Ramsus for that, and his inscrutable consistency. But what we can do is look back on a truly exquisite Kingdom of Zeal that we actually belonged to--at least the few old-timers who might be seeing this. Though it fell as kingdoms eventually must, visitors from the future can and do look back upon it with awe and great affection!
