User blog comment:Rhonda the stalker fan!/Future of Sprink's Stories./@comment-1874924-20131117233738

To be honest, the main reasons these stories haven't been deleted already is because I haven't had a lot of free time the last 3 months and the Candidates for deletion page had a large backlog at the time Sprink made his request.

No, this isn't the end of the Golden Age--that ended years ago. I commented on that at length way back in my 4,000th Edit milestone blog. (For context, I will soon hit 10,000.) The way I see it, the Golden Age ended in the summer of 2010, when (a) Wikia took away the popular Monaco skin and inflicted the current skin on us; (b) Violet Hill became the last of the wiki's Big Four noncompetition stories at the time (after Total Wikia Elementary, Life After Lies and Legacy) to win Featured Story; and (c) voter turnout for the monthly Features, which has always been a good barometer of user engagement, began a severe long-term decline.

The Silver Age began the following summer, marked by a wave of active new users, a general increase in the quality of new stories, and a major surge in Feature voter turnout that led to the revival of Featured Quote. The Silver Age ended in the summer of 2012, when Sprink left and several other highly active stalwarts of the wiki left soon after. So while the long-delayed (and yes, probably excessively delayed) deletion of Sprink's stories is sad, it doesn't really mark an Age boundary.