The interesting thing with you, Oz, is your unwillingness to change (as if you could stop it from happening!). The 'old boy network exists', but what you don't seem to get is that every one of those members has, to some degree, changed, evolved, and generally become other than what they were when they first posted. Their originality and value on this board comes from that evolution.

A news flash for you: YOU are changing, too--not nearly enough, and in ways that aren't fully visible yet, I think--but you stubbornly hold on to an adolescent notion of authenticity that's really tiresome. You're changing, dude. Go ahead and try not to.

If you want to tell me that's simply my opinion (though you wouldn't word it that way)--well, you'd be wrong. And I don't mean you'd be wrong because others share my opinion. They do, I suspect, but that isn't the issue.

You'd be wrong because you ARE childish. You ARE hypersensitive to criticism and almost fully incapable of allowing that it influences you. THAT IS YOU as you present on this board. There's no opinion about it. Opinions are for ISSUES--things about which there can be some reasonable disagreemnt. Who's debating this? You're ODD (Oppositional/Defiant Disordered) until evidence to the contrary appears.

You won't LEAVE this board that way if you stay around long enough (there were others like you before, young fella), but don't misread that for an invitation to stay.
As it stands, you won't tone things down because you're being TOLD to. Eventually people will stop asking (and stop listening to you), and you'll soon notice yourself just toning it down enough in order to be heard. We'll notice, too. Hard as it seems to imagine, you'll become "normalized" and you'll change. You WILL. Given enough time, there isn't a choice involved.

Unfortunately, right now, you're still at the stage where you feel right at home peeing in the pool. So did I when I was seven.