Drama Majors Only
Over the years that I have been a member here, I've seen many departures, some more memorable than others, and it has led me to conclude that if you decide to leave SP, you should do so in style instead of going quietly, which is no fun for anyone and virtually assures that you will soon be forgotten.
Hopefully, this article will provide some useful tips for how to make your exit from SP one for the memories!
Was someone mean to you in the forum? Did somebody insult your beliefs? Are there too many pictures of flowers and cats? Too many hiking pages? Not enough serious climbers? Well, it's time to burn the house down!
There are two essential components to a good public breakup with SP: flaming in the forum and deleting your material. Let's examine the two in more detail.
Flaming the Forum
In Site Feedback, start a thread with a long, angry condemnation of SP, using plenty of bold and caps. For maximum effect, do all or most of the following:
- With as much hyperbole as you can muster, tell us your problem and why it merits becoming a public spectacle.
- Point out how much better the site used to be back in the day, whenever that was for you.
- Predict the site's demise and try to give an estimated date for it.
- Bash the moderators. If you're the type who likes throwing dirt in the forums, you'll probably want to take the position that the moderators are too heavy-handed and are squelching free speech. If you're the type who is easily offended, you'll want to allege that the moderators don't enforce the rules and that the site has gone to the trolls and other uncivil characters.
- Don't forget to attack the people you don't like. This is your chance to really show the world who those people are.
- For good measure, bring up past members and equate their reasons for leaving the site with yours. Inform us that they would be mortified to see what the site has become. This form of name-dropping lends you moral authority.
- Hang around for at least a few days so that you can make retorts against anyone who responds unfavorably to your post. After all, it's no fun when the person announcing he is quitting actually quits and goes away.
Deleting Material
Doing this is probably more gratifying if you're reeling drunk or high on religious fervor, but you must, in one constant rage, gleefully, actually maniacally, delete everything you've ever submitted just to punish the rest of us. What might have collectively amounted to days or weeks or even months of effort on your part, you can wipe out in seconds. Awesome! And you get the satisfaction of having taught the whole world a lesson as well! Because no one else will ever find a way up that mountain now!
New formatting on SP now keeps you from deleting something if someone else has signed the climber's log, but never fear, for I will tell you how to prevail in your epic-worthy fight: all you need to do is go to the page editor and delete all the content. The page will stay, the logs will stay, and attachments will stay, but your priceless words will be gone and the whole world will suffer.
Next step: if you haven't done so already, go to the forum and announce that you have deleted all your material. Make a sanctimonious speech that will get lots of thanks from people who share your worldview. Ignore the fact that people who actually know you and know when and why you went off the deep end are staying silent for the sake of your dignity.
Final Step
You have to come back. Almost everyone does. Announce your error, ask to get your stuff back, whatever. But accept that you have forever squandered any right to be taken seriously after creating the kind of teen-queen drama most people deride.
Above all else, create drama. Since your life apparently lacks excitement, you can always manufacture it here!
Or you can just fill out this form and submit it:
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