The problem that PW and the other mods are running into is that they've banned everybody with personality and intelligence...
HEY! I haven't been banned... 
Neither have I. Come to think of it, neither has Dressel, Norga Rotem, etc. I smell vast right wing conspiracy here 
Not quite. I'm neither a right winger nor am I "dull" and I'm still kicking around over there.
Truth is, while many of the most interesting characters on that site have outgrown it and left, either for this place...or for GH....I'm not sure that really affected the site. It affected the community when good people left it, but the site still has the same strengths and weaknesses it's always had. The only difference is the people that made it what it was so many years ago have now been replaced by kids who never got to experience those times. Unfortunatley for them, they don't realize it used to be a haven from scalpers and a community where people actually cared about each other's opinions (rather than just glossing over dozens of pages to post their own 2 cents).
It's incredibly fast moving now, but I'm not sure how much of that traffic is actual decent conversation. A lot of it is "Me too" kind of stuff. For example...every time a Sideshow toy goes on sale at RS, we have 40 page threads of people saying "Got mine, that was easy". No one's actually talking to each other in those threads, and there are so many.
Where are the heated debates about figures? Brown coat Han anyone?
They're still there...but they move so fast and change faces so much, they're hard to keep up with.
So, was there ever
really a "Golden Age"? I think RS is like SNL. People talk about it like it used to be so much better, but the fact is....because it's the biggest collecting site out there, it's pretty much always been plagued with the same problems. It's also always had the same great things going for it. I may look fondly back on the "old days", but I think it's still good now.
They've improved the quality of the Collector's engine, they have more photos of new stuff than ever, they have more con coverage than any other site out there....and now they're covering other toy lines too. Sure, not all those ideas are original, but what on the internet IS these days?
On the bad side, they still have the noobs, the trolls and all those other things that a big site like that attracts. It seems the scalpers are making a comeback because there's a lack of good moderation right now. I believe all these problems are simply because they don't have the one thing they need: More mods. Good ones too, not just cherry picking the people with the highest post counts. The reason they don't have more moderators is because the staff is too disconnected from the community to be picking out the members that would be good candidates.
JD has great mods. If traffic jumped to RS levels, I'd like to believe this place would add volunteer moderators to keep up with it out of the huge stable of cool people here. That's the one thing RS has never really done....and that's why they continually have the same problems.
I still love em though.
