Yesterday I encountered some technical difficulties with my new Wii (check here if you’d like to here more about that.) Anyways, my first reaction was to post about in on the GameFAQS message board.
The exchange that gets me is this:
gamerelite1: point [the wii remote] at the screen noob (The message has since been deleted by a mod)
Ledian Warrior (me): Thank you, gamerelite1, for the mature and helpful reply to a serious request for help.
gamerelite1: er it was serious
How must a person’s mind work to think “point at the screen noob” is an appropriate and serious reply to a request for technical help? After his second post, I had to restrain myself from posting the replies I wanted to.
I’m very glad I belong to at least one message board where proper capitalization and some semblance of grammar are the norm rather than the exceptions.
Your doing great, if they didn’t start out calling you names in the first three posts. I gave up on many boards, where the typical response was to a question the poster’s parentage and sister’s species.
Posters on the GameFAQS PC forums do seem more articulate than their console counterparts. When the forums merged with Gamespot, there were many complaints about the lowered quality of new posters. They have since removed the (gs) tag from poster’s names to keep people from dismissing a Gamespot user’s opinions. It does seem to me that the lack of avatars on Gamefaqs and SDMB discourages idiocy to some extent.
There are fewer bright colours, big pictures and flashing lights here - tends to discourage a certain class of people, I suspect.
I posted a thread a little while about how I would probably get kicked off of a different message board soon, because I was having a hard time fitting in with their culture of not debating properly and writing LMFAO every other line, among other things that bugged me. If you’re a Doper at heart, it’s hard to go anywhere else for your surfing needs.
And there is a difference between “your” and “you’re,” too - “your” is possessive, and “you’re” is the contraction of “you are.”
If you want GameFAQs boards where a lot of the posts and the majority of answers are in something that comes close to standard English, you have to go to the ones with less than 250 topics. Give it five years and you’ll like that board a lot more.
GameFAQs is pretty plain though for a board that attracts that kind of poor spelling. I don’t know what colour options there are, but there aren’t any pictures or flashing on the boards. Heck, the messages have to be plain text except for bolding and underlining.
I understand this, as, well, I used to be a member on a board whose sole topic was makeup. (The main reason I posted and was a member was to get updates on special events for MAC cosmetics before they came out.) I was hoping that there’d be a wee bit of intelligent banter, but unfortunately I got a stern warning from moderators when I commented on a thread started by a girl who wanted to do drastic weight loss. The issue: one poster mentioned the “don’t lift more than 10 lbs. or you’ll turn into a muscle monster” idea, and I refuted it, complete with citations. Apparently by not going “oh, sweetie, if you just drink less slim fast and do a little pilates, you’ll be thin in no time!” instead of trying to give the girl concrete advice in the face of stupidity, I got warned that I would be banned if I tried this again. Yeah, after having a PM conversation with the mod who warned me (who accidentally sent me a message that was not intended for me but indicated that my actions were being scrutinized as a group in a “OMG, what is wrong with her?” fashion), I asked another mod to delete my account.
In short, I don’t seem to do well on boards where “feel good” messages and continuing the cycle of girls as stupid human beings are the only ones that are approved. ::shrugs::
There really ought to be an international law that the OP has the right to delete non-responsive posts from any thread he starts.
So many go off into the ozone before a person with a brain arrives.
And it’s worst on tech sites, where people will see six posts and not even open the thread, assuming you’ve already been helped.
I would guess that video game forums tend to attract a lot more teenagers than boards like this do. It may not be sheer idiocy so much as it is immaturity.
