misplaced.
Heh! Funny.
I don’t discount your experience, but mine was different. When I joined I felt very welcomed, even when I got push back for weak arguments and the like. My second post here had a grammatical error, which funny since I was commenting on how much a priority using good grammar was, and I was teased, but not abused.
As JC said, report abusive posts so we can look at them.
Which funny, huh?
Dammit. And I had just edited out another error. Seriously. I should never mention grammar.
(Furiously proofreads post)
I like this post, which nice meta self reference.
eta: ninja’d. So who says important responses are slow in coming?
Funny, funny boy.
I have heard that some old timers miss the annual rebate checks for high click-count posts…
It’s hard for me to assess how much the board has changed because I have been changing too. These days I stay away from angrily contentious threads, so to me the board seems calmer and more relaxed. Also I don’t participate in other message boards so I don’t have anything to contrast to. I suspect, from what I’ve heard, that the moderation and general tone here will have spoiled me for other boards.
Fewer yaks.
I was a lurker on these boards off and on in the 90s and early 2000s, and there was a distinct ‘clubhouse’ vibe that isn’t really around now. There were a lot of Dope-related meetups, and a lot of board personalities talking to each other in person about other people. There were a ton of in-jokes (like the “Hi, Opal” thing), a lot more ‘blog post’ threads, and a sort of incestuous feeling to it. Paradoxically, there was also a lot more in-depth discussion on GQ posts - while you still get an occasional interesting one, getting multiple pages of people adding interesting comments (not just flamewar or joke posts) was routine.
We’re all a lot older! 
From what polls we’ve had about age, birth year, etc., the median age of active Dopers is apparently somewhere in the mid-40s. So there’s a lot more posters in their 60s and 70s than there were when this board got started.
I’ve been around since 2002 and I really do believe there’s a lot more nastiness and hostility now between those of different political persuasions. Of course that probably just reflects the world outside the board.
As others have noted, there is a lot less drama than there used to be. I’d say that’s roughly equal parts due to the moderators (won’t say they’ve never done anything I disagreed with, but on the whole they’re great), and the fact that (as I just mentioned) we’re all a lot older. Eventually almost all of us get tired of gratuitous drama.
I found the Straight Dope after watching a TV show that mentioned someone had been guillotined and blinked for some number of times afterwards, which seemed like a huge load of BS to me, so I went searching on the internet and found Cecil’s article about decapitation. I was instantly hooked on the articles, and now I own all of the books (I know some folks are like “There are books?”). I’m still a complete junkie for the articles.
I can give them up at any time, I swear, dude… just not this week, ok?
When I first looked at the message boards, I found them to be very cliquish and not very welcoming to newbies. If I hadn’t been completely hooked on Cecil’s articles, I would have never stuck around. About a year later, I finally warmed up to the message boards and joined. I mostly stayed in GQ though. It took me a long time to branch out into other forums. These days, the only place I don’t go is the Pit.
The boards got a lot less cliquish after a few years, but I still think we have a long way to go towards being newbie-friendly. One thing I took away from the recent zombie discussion is the realization that some people here have absolutely no clue about how rude and unwelcoming they are.
I was a collector of the books but I can’t remember if it was one of them or the TV show that had the AOL website advertised in the back.
The board has changed a lot over the last 20+ years, it used to be the go-to for factual answers and honest debate. That has changed significantly due to the creation of websites such as Wikipedia, Snopes, etc…
I also don’t remember moderators decisions being challenged, defended, and debated as much.
how I found the dope online was aol used to have this keyword “random” and it would bring out a roulette wheel and youd go to different forums at randon
but I learned about the column through a article in readers digest
The first cecil article I read online was a thing on the meaning steve millers "the pompatus of love " because there was a movie named after it …
One thing that’s changed is we don’t have as many “proudly” antisocial members or they don’t post as much anyway I remember the topic was someone had a job where you had to be somewhat social and the op was " I don’t want to socialize just let me work and go home "
It delved into sadness really quick where people were proud that they sat out the xmas party and just did word puzzles in their office …
remember when the board would shut down for an hour or two a night for maintence ? or when the board was down for almost 2 months and tuba resorted to paying for temporary boards because we overloaded all the free ones back then ?
actually my first friend was opal who would send me nice mommy like pms telling me to go to bed after she noticed that I had been posting about every 15-20 minutes for 3 days …(she thought I was on stuff …but its just my weird sleeping problems)
But I do miss some of the posters we don’t see anymore like stoid eve esperix …
we also only had 5 forums back then too
When I first got on here (2006), Exapno Mapcase replied to a couple of my posts in what I considered a needlessly nitpicky and snotty manner. I couldn’t fathom what I had said that could have gotten me dead into his crosshairs like that. I left in a miffed mood and almost didn’t come back (3 months later).
Note that the concept of reporting posts was simply not grasped, at all, and I doubt most newbies would know that there is even a relatively well-run mod loop here that they can appeal to, at all.
I can empathize. My join date says 2008 but I’ve really only become active about the last two years, and I still feel like a ‘newbie’. It’s no secret message board activity is down everywhere and the reasons for it have a great deal more to do with new technologies and changing demographics than any posting behaviors here. It’s nice of you suggest the board might be built up again, but that’s unlikely to occur due to the aforementioned reasons, despite many people’s good intentions and efforts otherwise.
This board’s activity will likely continue to decline through attrition, but a very active and committed core here suggests The End will not be coming for a number of years and a lot of good interactions can take place here in the meantime. To that end, it’s a good idea to make new posters feel welcome.
As it happens I’ve been a moderator on another message board for a number of years and have found myself dealing with the same issues this board is facing. As far as the moderating here goes I give it a solid A-/B+ and seems to run the gamut from competent to downright superb. Speaking as an ‘outsider’ the moderating staff here plays the ‘balancing act’ as well as any group can.
Bad moderating can hurt a message board, but as indicated that’s not particularly a problem here. There appears to be, however, a few cultural things that are actively working to discourage new posters: offering unsolicited criticism is typically received as well as a turd in a punchbowl and IRL can get you a broken nose, yet, it’s not uncommon here. A number of posters seem to take delight in finding fault in other posters’ spelling, grammar, (and, yes, faulty reasoning). I understand this board is ostensibly dedicated to ‘fighting ignorance’ but there’s a strong impression that many of these corrections have much more to do with bolstering some folks’ egos while trying to make others look foolish than they have to do with transmitting enlightenment. There’s a right way and a wrong way to approach this.
One can see some of what I call ‘old-timer syndrome’. This usually manifests itself when long time posters visibly lose patience with the new guys and grouse when ‘old’ topics get resurrected or reintroduced, sometimes with testy comments like* ‘yeah, here’s link to a similar discussion we had about this back in 2007. Why dontcha do a search before you start a new discussion…’*. Or ‘gah, not another snowflake starting a thread about (whatever)…’ [/cyber eye roll]. This sort of thing tends to exert a chilling effect on new posters.
Lastly, there’s the age old question about what to do about the ‘special’ posters. Not really the ‘one and dones’, but the clueless-contrary ones who you can just tell from the get-go are going to end up banned sooner rather than later. It can be ‘fun’ to prod such specimens with a stick when they surface. There IS a certain entertainment value there and I’ve been known to do this very thing myself elsewhere, BUT upon more sober reflection it becomes apparent this sort of thing readily lends itself to the impression that there is an US and a THEM. Sure, the clueless poster is getting barbecued for being, well, clueless, but a newbie seeing this situation unfold is left with the feeling that cliques prevail and that the pack will gnaw on outsiders who displease them and can just as easily be turned off by this sort of interaction as entertained.
Anywho, I asked about this board’s historical changes because I was wondering how it compared to the other board I hang out on. I particularly liked the Old West analogy and can see that description also aptly described the other board about 15 years ago. Interesting stuff.