As a member during the New Leaf years, it had its ups and downs. The worst year in my opinion was 2015, but the early New Leaf era was pretty bad in general. At first, people took Bells, items, and villagers way too seriously. And then the collectible craze started. People used to charge 50,000 TBT for one white feather. Chocolate cakes were also high in demand and reached 4,000 TBT at the peak. And I cannot forget all the times users have been spamming or fighting in Brewster’s, with the original What’s Bothering You thread war being the site’s lowest point. People on GameFAQs even said that Bell Tree was a horrible place.I kinda wish I used this site back when I was a teenager instead of social media sites and a different forum that was already on its last legs. Both places were very poorly moderated and I saw some things and dealt with people I shouldn’t have at that age.
This site is moderated very well, has a lot of meaningful content, and is pretty active for a forum that’s almost as old as I am. Being able to see this site during the New Leaf years must’ve been really cool.
From what I've seen of the old posts and veteran TBTer anecdotes, the forums were a lot worse back then. See here.I kinda wish I used this site back when I was a teenager instead of social media sites and a different forum that was already on its last legs. Both places were very poorly moderated and I saw some things and dealt with people I shouldn’t have at that age.
This site is moderated very well, has a lot of meaningful content, and is pretty active for a forum that’s almost as old as I am. Being able to see this site during the New Leaf years must’ve been really cool.
I wasn’t the best either. After all, I was the one who threatened to leave if I didn’t get anymore fanart of my character during the winter while calling two drawings of my character “bad”. I also rejected a yellow candy I won in a giveaway and put everyone that gave me a backlash in a negative light in a blog entry few months later. But yes, there were a lot worse people than me. It’s a good thing that we have a rule against trolling, and then a rule against constant negativity since the darkest days.Yeeeaah...as a vet of these forums things were DEFINITELY a lot worse back then! A lot of people had some major growing up to do...grant it I've posted some stupid **** and am certainly no saint myself...but damn, man! Some people lol.
And it’s all because money making was significantly nerfed while ACNH was released half-baked. I hope Nintendo learned their lessons. But I do have to have to say that there were some parts about vBulletin Era TBT that I liked better, such as:Although the forum 10 years ago had major problems, some of which I knew at the time, it also had more charm to it imo. I stand by what I said in that post of mine on that thread. TBT post-2020 is great and all because it's better moderated, but it's also severely lacking in that kind of charm... perhaps because the ACNH hype died out so quickly.
On the Pokémon forum/server I’ve moderated for five years I’ve had to deal with hundreds of bots. They just come in a never ending stream every day. During the email verification process we can usually tell when a new account is a bot, but sometimes they slip through the cracks. Thankfully it hasn’t happened recently.Bots are creepy. There's another forum I hang around on. It usually get these sneaky pest a little more often.