Four years on TBT

[Alolan_Apples]

Yep, it’s my fourth anniversary on TBT! It’s amazing to see how old of a member I am. And if there is a four-year cycle, I made it all the way here.

I’m gonna begin with my history on this site with the last year. As it was my first full year under the Alolan_Apples username, it was not a very active year. One of my big goals on TBT was to get to 10,000 TBT, which I maintained, but I decided to buy chocolate cake collectibles, which dragged me down to 4,000 TBT. Then I continued to plummet, with the candies being the final blow. I recovered over time by re-selling the candies, selling the eggs at the egg hunt, and ultimately, selling the chocolate cakes. I also donated a lot to help other members and bought the envelopes add-on, but I eventually got back to 10,000 TBT.

Here are some other things that happened this past year:

• For the first time in over two years, I have received warnings/profile infractions from the staff. Although I screwed up, the fact I went a while without receiving warnings shows that I’m doing a good job following the rules. The last one was from late February. If I can keep with following the rules, I can go another two years (or even longer) without one.
• Although I still talk politics on this site (even after I promised that I’ll stop), the political dramas have died down. It was really big back during the election and extended to a year after, but it finally slowed down. To be honest, I thought the community was way worse before the political dramas than during or even after. Prior to Trump’s run for presidency, this site was full of spoiled brats and other troublemakers that made this site uncomfortable for me and others. There was a cyberbullying blog beyond this site back then, a couple members left because of rude people, and even a popular thread was shut down due to a widespread forum war that plagued the thread. It was so bad the staff had to update the rules. The site eventually calmed down, despite political discussions and dramas.
• One of the worst experiences I had within the past year was when the site slowed down due to how bad the servers are. The site was loading very slowly, sometimes it would go down, even when it’s not popular by bots. And this is around the time of my birthday, my 25th birthday (which would’ve been a special birthday for me). And then not too long after switching servers, the site got hacked. February was a very bad month for technical issues, but at least the staff tried to make it entertaining.
• A new type of event was announced on TBT: The Bell Tree Weeks. Those are week-long events that specialize on a particular topic pertaining to Animal Crossing or something else. We had two so far. We also had an April Fools/Easter mix event, an event dedicated to the 5th anniversary of ACNL, and a more improved Christmas event.
• My favorite incident between my third and fourth anniversaries on TBT was the Christmas filter incident, where every use of the word “Halloween” on this site (past or present) was filtered and replaced with the word “Christmas”, even if you bypass the filter. It only lasted between the fair and the first day of October.
• Despite my weird and unique successes I had for a while, I officially got a staff favorite for the first time in TBT Fair history, something I wanted to get since the 2014 Fair. I also thought the 2017 TBT Fair was the best TBT Fair ever.
• I wasn’t as active this year as before. Due to my loss of interest in this site and my focus on Roller Coaster Tycoon and other stuff, I wasn’t popping in here. But I regained interest after getting back to 10k TBT, which I’m now hoping to double.

How will this next year go? Let’s see...

 

[That Marshal Fangirl]

Congrats, dude! Your blog entries are always fascinating to read.