It's not about pointing fingers and telling people they shouldn't enjoy festivals. But, festivals should be something special, as someone before put it very well, something to look forward to. You should be able to feel the excitement building, mounting. People should be awaiting the festival, as something to truely celebrate. Right now, I've this feeling that offer exceeds demand to the point that, in many cases, people are indifferent: they may participate to the festival if there is one, but they wouldn't miss it if there wasn't any

Another major issue is that, whether big and site-wide, or small and at the initiative of one or two people, festivals ALWAYS end up being a responsibility for the scribes, even if you don't intend for them to be. The site is built in a way that many things are just impossible to set up without their intervention. And that's when everything runs smoothly, because we've also known organizators going AWOL after having well advertized their festival, so that someone absolutely had to step in, and no one but the scribes has any "obligation", if only moral, to do so. Like Apo underlined it, festivals have become the most time-consuming of their activities, which means that they just don't have the time to focus properly on much else, not only when it's happening but also in the month or two prior while they organize it. Even with only two important festivals happening in your world in a year, say Goldfest and one world-specific festival only, that's still up to four months focused on planification and setting up events (i.e. a third of the year). And if you want to do it well, you have to focus on it almost exclusively, at least for those of us who have a life outside AW

Also, the understanding I had of what should be a festival, reinforced by the realisation that many people share it here, was that it should be a way to have fun and learn about the culture it represents. Someone previously specified that people in ancient times themselves would live "from one festival to the next". Maybe so. Festivals did punctuate people's lives, and that probably even before writing allowed for their recording. However, those people would be immersed in this life and culture. The issue I see here is that now there are so many of them that you tend to participate to a given quiz or hunt not even really sure of what festival it's a part of anymore. Events sometimes have also nothing to do with the festival it's supposed to take place either. Some fun just for the lack of fun, that's all good, but I wonder how much this happens because in fact, people just don't have the time to make research and think things through anymore. I'm talking here from experience, maybe some other are able to line up 5 or more festivals in a year and still come with a brilliant idea every other day. But I know I can't, and my guess is I'm not the only one

As for the Daily Index, it doesn't bother me that festival posts tend to clutter it, but it does bother me when I'm more or less being told that my academical posting during a festival is a "waste of everybody's time" because it detracts from the festival (as if....) and because my posts won't get read anyway. I'm sure the person was caught in the moment but, damn, I spend something like $70-80 per month on this site, I consider that's enough to give me the right to post where I want when I want it and not feel obligated to go to parties I don't care about instead of posting the result of hours of research I'm excited to share, even if only a couple people read them and that I'll never get any feedback

Again, it's no about saying that festivals shouldn't happen. I'm not their biggest fan, but I also think that people have enough contraints in their lives already without having to be told what they should or not like to do online. But I genuinely think that too many festivals throughout the year is counterproductive at this point, for the reasons expressed above