remember flare?

[Blac]

just googled his name

he went ham on reddit

Why Gaia has gone from a fun-loving community to a half-dead corporation-run shitbox. : gaiaonline

[The Unintelligible]

Good find OP.

I lol'd. Just glad that prepubescent kid is gone from this site. Good riddance.

[Stapled]

R.I.P 323.

[GAMEchief]

Given the time between that post and this one, I'd say you were stalkin' him for a while.

BLACKUP:

So, many of you remember the old Gaia - Every announcement was new developer news, site announcements, and personal messages from the admins. Gaia was a very tight-knit community with great content. Then, the Donation Letters started. If you donated money that month, you would receive a special item! Cool, right? That's what many thought, and it was a great new feature added to the site. Seeing that they could make money with it, they expanded it more. Making announcements solely about these monthly collectibles and such.
Then, around this time, the sponsors started. A few harmless ads in the beginning, displayed in the footers or on the front page. No one really minded. Then, suddenly, they started getting items from sponsors and special Towns-like areas for these sponsors. Many were annoyed, but didn't make a big deal about it, and moved on. The cash shop also came out around this time. It was liked by many, as well as hated by may more. Overall, though, users didn't mind too much. Back then, an item bundle was 750-999 GCash, and a single item was 100-400 GCash. Now days, a single item will run you upwards of 700 GCash.
The sponsoring and pushing of the cash store started to get worse and worse. Suddenly, there were no more normal personalized announcements. There were only ads for cash shop items, and ads for their sponsors. The Gaia administrators and developers were beginning to get greedy, finding out how much money they could really make off of this site of theirs. Sure, they needed to keep it running, but that didn't justify things like ruining the announcements or the overall interaction of staff and users.
At this point, talking to a staff member at all and getting a normal, friendly post was hard. They were all business, all the time. Before you would catch them posting in the CB and other forums, but now you never saw them post anywhere except for threads they were required to post in (Staff suggestion threads, rule threads, and the like.)
Events started to turn into inflation controllers rather than fun events for the community. What used to be "Come join us in Towns for crazy aliens and Zurg stuff!" turned into "Buy this item over and over for this NPC, whichever NPC has the most gold sunk into them wins!" and it was all just a big goldsink, also known as a way to remove large sums of gold from the economy to help control inflation.
Now, things have only gotten worse. Look at cash shop prices. Look at prices of items all over Gaia. Chances are the item price has risen 10-20k since last year, maybe even more since 2008 or 2009. Gold is becoming worthless. Cash shop items are being shoved down your throat.
Gaia has turned to shit. If only we had a "RESET" button.
I remember back in 2006, when I joined, saying "Wow, this is awesome! I wonder if I'm going to remember this when I'm 30, I bet these items will be super valuable! Actually, I'll probably never stop playing Gaia! I mean why would I, this is the best community and site ever!" Well that's all gone now, so there's no reason for me to stay.
Also known as, I'm quitting. Fuck Gaia. It's been a good eight years.
Rest in Peace, and good luck to those of you who wish to piss into the lake of piss you call a site.

Also funny: the time he texted me for programming help like I would want to help him, then got all confused and upset like he didn't understand why I wouldn't.

[The Unintelligible]

I don't think that necessarily constitutes stalking. Especially on the internet -- an information hub.

edit: I mean if I cared about Flare I probably would have looked him up myself. I wouldn't consider it "stalking" from my perspective.

[Blac]

Idk, I keep tabs on a lot of old LG members. Just something fun to do when I'm bored.

[Vesparia]

tl;dr

but okay.