User blog:Angel Emfrbl/"13 year old brat?"

You've seen them around the anime forums... The 13 year old hyper brat.

Actually is not THAT bad
Half our vandals are in truth young teenagers with nothing better to do then type "poop" on every page. On forums they ask the typical "noob" questions or don't read the rules... Or act stupid.

Well, most of them are just looking for a chance to look big after all. The ones who want "in" are the forum noobs and the ones who want to make fun of you are just showing off. To veterans, this group of younger teens are an annoyance and they have no patience. Like a brother or sister who has been forced to taken along their younger sibling on a date, they get easily annoyed and loose their temper with them.

What they are are simply inexperienced and bored. They want in but but too keen on just bursting through the door and not looking where they are going. So they'll ignore half the rules of any site forum, or snap at people. They are as varied as even the veterans are with a full potential to learn, but the trouble is they don't now how to go about it. The best way is properly to be hard of them, but many will act up when you do so. Obviously, you can be "nice" to them because they never learn, but at the same time, their hormones will drive them sometimes into stupid mode wherein they do more damage then good.

Yet from mid-teen onwards, they change and start maturing. Some retain their attitude problem, others calm down completely. However there is a difference between inexperienced and "dumb" which many net vets would call them. Dumb is knowing the rules and breaking them on purpose. Dumb is pushing the boundaries of the forum owners patience knowing that your triggering their wrath. Dumb to put it simply, is not knowing when to stop doing the wrong and try to get along with everyone.

At the end of the day, most are just following a fad or trend, but its over they'll leave quietly to find a new thing to do. Typically, the worst communities are the ones with LOTS of them in it. Mostly because they have so many teens there they just don't have the experience between any of them to get work done. So they retain some of their hyper-activeness, something they can only loose by going to a mixed age and background forum. Boys are attracted to the easier to grasp and more action based shows, while girls are starting to think about material values so are more likely to be attracted to the pretty male characters (boys will catch up and do this from mid-teen onwards themselves, sooner if their trying to look "big" by having porn or something).

At the end of the end, half the task in dealing with them is waiting for them to "grow up" and calm down. Give them just two years and the influx slows down, they become more reasonable. A few more years and they'll calm down completely, aside from the anti-social who use the internet to justify their own measures. Actually, this is the point where they become dangerous, adults are by far more likely to do damage to a wikia or hack a system. So in that sense, the 13 year is a blessing for its naivety and a curse likewise for the same thing. Amazingly, the group wanting to be "in" are actually the group that are better to talk to, you explain things to them and they grasp the terms and likewise quick because to them its their social bread and butter.

The problem is just... The other group...