This has potential - from their masthead:
I can get on board (see what I did there? 
) with that.
SomethingAwful is first and foremost an internet humor site that supports a set of forums, although most of us tend to think of it the other way around. At some point, you’ve probably seen at least one of their Photoshop Phridays. In comparison to the SDMB, I’d say the following:
[ul]
[li]It’s a more active board with about twice as many total posters as we have here, and probably a higher proportion of active members.[/li][li]Compared to here, the posters are younger and maybe a little rowdier.[/li][li]There are some very clever and creative people over there. Take a look at this thread on giving birds arms for one of the best recent examples.[/li][li]There are fewer rules, but they’re enforced more stringently. On the other hand, you have to do something pretty bad to earn more than a short suspension. Permanent banning is reserved for posting child porn or similar offenses.[/li][li]Membership is staggered. Joining costs $10. If you want to search, that’s an extra $10. If you want to be able to do private messages, that’s yet another $10. I just have the basic membership and I don’t think I’m missing out on anything.[/li][li]People are a little less nice, but you’re generally allowed to tell someone to fuck off in a thread. Every once in a while this results in a thread being derailed, but it’s not generally a problem.[/li][li]The culture varies a little bit more from forum to forum. Since they’re organized by topic rather than style of discussion, most people only hang out in a few forums.[/li][li]Discussing illegal activities is more permitted–there’s even a drug use forum, although you’re not allowed to discuss obtaining drugs.[/li][/ul]
I think that roughly covers the major points. If you lurk in GBS or another forum that looks interesting for a little while, you can get a sense of whether it’s for you.
Another vote for SA, which is where i am now taking my forum money.
I didn’t even know there was grumbling. Boy I’m either out of the loop or incredibly dense. 
Count me as another one that has no idea what’s going on.
As far as I can recall there’s always a quibbling here or there of what a mod decided but nothing, besides to who was involved, required manning the lifeboats… And I’ve been here on and off for like, what, eight years? Usually isn’t even anything too major, and if it was the boards made a more specific rule and both members and mods followed it from then on.
What’s everyone in a fuss about?
The controversy is entirely about the Pit. If you never visit there (or About This Message Board, for that matter), it’s understandable that you don’t know.
But a lot of people use the Pit to blow of steam (or at least enjoy reading invective from others), so that’s why they’re upset and leaving (among some related issues involving moderation).
And another. At least three-quarters of my message board time is spent over there these days. As mentioned previously, it does skew a bit younger than the Dope, but it’s a hell of a lot funnier (no offense to anyone here, but it’s the forum of a comedy website, after all), and there are a lot of very intelligent folks there. It’s also worth noting that if you don’t like the crowd in a particular subforum over there, you’ll find a mostly different group in another subforum. There’s some overlap, of course, but not nearly as much as we have here.
Just so nobody unfamiliar with SA wastes their money because of this thread, I’ll just mention here that search has been broken on SA for about a year. But the $10 you pay for that also gets you PM capabilities and a couple other little things, I think. Also, Google does a much better job of searching the live forums over there than they do here. Still not perfect, though, and doesn’t search the archives.
Oh, one more thing. If you go to SA because you miss the Pit and want to rail on other posters, there is a subforum dedicated to that (Helldump 2000), but you really don’t want to go starting threads or even posting in there unless you’re very familiar with the culture. Many, many, many times a clueless new poster has had a Helldump callout thread they started turn on them, often in a spectacular and hilarious fashion. Just a friendly warning. 
I think I’m gonna give “Real Life” a try.
A lot of other boards (ok, hell, most other boards) are funnier/have a better sense of humor/whatever you wanna call it.
A few specialty boards serve some of my specific interests better (no one ever wants to talk about mountain biking or mma here :mad:)
But for general discussion, I haven’t found a board that beats this one, and most of what I care to do is general discussion.
I’m surprised to see so many votes for SA as a SDMB replacement; I think of SA as a forum more in line with 4chan than this place.
It’s actually pretty hard for me to think of a place quite like the Dope, but I’ll mull it over. In the meantime, thanks for the suggestions I hadn’t heard of; I’ll have to check them out.
On many of the subforums on SA, you can get probated or banned if you consistently don’t use proper capitalization/punctuation, or if you use too much AOL-speak. And some slang (e.g. LULZ, FTW) is punishable after only a single use.
The frowning-on of stuff like that is what reminds me of the SDMB a bit.
You could try TalkRational. There are a few Dopers, former and current, who post there (but I won’t out them here.)
Not a message board, but have a look at MetaFilter.
The main bit is like MPSIMS, with links to cool stuff, but also with hints of GD and the Pit in the comments; AskMe is a superior version of GQ, with a bit of IMHO mixed in; MetaTalk is Pit-ish and there are a few more subsites as well, including a music one where members can share tunes they’ve made. The mods and admins are pretty cool, folk like Adam Savage are members, hell, the Woz even turned up to answer a question about himself.
TalkRational looks good. There’s also PhilosophyForums. Perhaps it would be an idea, though, to create a new MB with all the same forums as the SDMB? Yeah, there’s other splinter forums, but these are all centred around one individual, or a geographic region.
I found SA to be one of the worst moderated boards. Even the “serious” Debate & Discussion forum is pretty bad. Name calling as a substitute for argument is rife with no Mod action yet if you commit the crime of “cheerleading” which amounts to saying something like: “that’s the kind of thing you’d say” or “let’s all agree the OP sucks” you get probated for a day to a week. Sarcasm also gets you probation for anything between a day to a month.
SA also has a “laissez faire” sub forum. About a month ago someone wished (in a “Death to Israel” thread) that AH had done a complete job on the Jews in WWII. No action was taken by the Mods and none of the other hundred or so other posters criticised him.
You’ll also find that a lot of posters there have proudly become Armchair Arafats with a large SA issued green and white “Al Aqsa Brigades” AK47 under the user avatar
I’ve given up on the place. All in all, it’s not a place I’d recommend to anyone.
I was thinking about this. I know it’s been asked before, but really - how much does it cost to set up a MB? All the software is available for free, the staff is all volunteer, if you can dig up a couple of PCs with a few hundreg GB and some horsepower seems to me all you need to pay for is bandwidth.
I guess the real trick would be getting the people to use it.
I don’t even think you need all that. Look here, for instance. $5.95 a month gets the latest version of vBulletin, 750gb of space, 7500gb of bandwidth a month with 99.9% uptime. Surely that’s more than enough to at least get a board off the ground?