An Open Letter complaining about the faults of a fan club/debate forum/assembly or community to its members.

generally am proud to be a member and contributor here. I am in the top 5% of posters here, because I enjoy being able to interact with deign oriented people all over the world. As a freelancer, that kind of community is very important to have.This forum is starting to take a downturn for the worse lately. I am seeing more and more immaturity and childish action on the parts of both the members and certain moderators. This forum is beginning to degrade into something we have all seen at other forums before; immature people making stupid posts and not helping anyone. Comments like “that stinks” or “go read a book” or “that suck” or any number of additional meaningless and unhelpful critiques are beginning to become more and more commonplace here. The prevailing attitude of “we love design, and we have a community around that” is changing to “I have a ripped copy of Photoshop and a shitty attitude”. I also see more and more general anger and bitterness towards each other, especial when someone tries to offer a critique. This community is running itself into the ground very rapidly and I for one hate to see that happen. GF has in the past been an excellent resource, and I think it would be a terrible shame to see it degrade into another useless forum.I see a lot of thread moving, and closing ‘my site got ripped’ topics when they are solved, and that’s about it from the moderators here. If you are looking to hang out and bullshit and have the kids worship your latest photo manipulation, then maybe you should not be a mod. The moderators have a responsibility to help steer the tone and attitude of the forum, not just houseclean the threads. I do see this from a few of the more senior moderators here but they are a minority. I think that there are some changes needed in the leadership of this forum. I do not see the moderator forums, so I do not know what goes on in discussion there, and it is certainly possible that am completely wrong. but I do know what I see happening on the open forum. Now I know some of the moderators, and I am very friendly with a few of them, so I know that they are certainly capable and intelligent, and that with their help I think the forum can be turned around.So what do we do? Why write this letter? I think we should use this thread to OPENLY and reasonably discuss this. I do not want to see “you have no idea what is going on the forum is just fine” What I want to see is an open dialog of intelligent and mature people discussing a way to help a slowly sinking ship.I want to end this by saying that the reason I am writing this is because I genuinely care about this forum, and I want to see it stay around for a long time as a positive and helpful place to go.