Other than stormfront, can someone give me some examples of what board wars the Straight Dope has had? Thanks in advance.
There has only been one “board war” and it was not with SF.
Several years ago, a Doper stumbled upon the Left Behind Message Board (associated with the La Haye novels) and posted that he found the site “interesting.” A number of Dopers visited and came back to his thread expressing various flavors of outrage or humor at the “ignorance” (since we’re fighting ignorance) displayed on that board, particularly in the areas of Scriptural exigesis (since the LBMB was heavily tilted toward literal interpretation of Scripture while a large number of Dopers are well versed in various historical and literary approaches to Scripture) and, of course, science, particularly the evolution/Creation conflict regarding biology.
Given the nature of Dopers, a number felt compelled to join in the LBMB discussions taking rationalist or skeptic (or, occasionally, Liberal Christian) perpectives. That, in and of itself, was not a problem. People should be free to post where they wish. Unfortunately, several of them returned to the original SDMB post and shared notes on the LBMB threads in which they were involved. (It did not help that several of the posts in that thread were quite dismissive of or insulting to LBMB posters.)
Finally, a disaffected Doper e-mailed an LBMB administrator with a link to the SDMB thread. The LBLM administrator, with rather more anger than sense, called a crusade (or issued a fatwah) against the SDMB. Several LBMB posters came to the SDMB to challenge the points made by the dopers in a serious fashion. A rather large number of their less reasonable posters flooded the SDMB with new threads (in every forum) simply expressing biblical one-liners or calling for our repentance.
After a couple of days, apologies were issued and the issue settled down. (A few of the serious LBMB posters actually stayed around as new Dopers)
That LBMB web site eventually crashed and burned under its own weight of internal dissent. There may or may not be an LBMB today, but it is not the same board.
Since that time, the SDMB policy has been fairly strict regarding board wars (DO NOT go to another board and announce that you are an emmissary from the “enlightened” Straight Dope and DO NOT go to another board then return to post “bad things” about that board on the SDMB.)
We have had one or two occasions when a number of SF posters have “invaded” the SDMB, but they have fallen into the categories of white nationalists who individually argue their points and eventually go away or they clearly act as trolls and are banned.
I do not feel that an “example” will serve any particular purpose. If you’re interested in seeing the actual threads, you might e-mail someone on the staff to see whether they wish to provide you a link to the original thread. (You really can’t see the “war” beause to do that you would need to find a way to display all the threads for the particular days that the “war” extended. Most of those threads were short and silly.)
Off topic, but this’d make a great feature addition for vBulletin 4.0.