Maybe I should have posted this in GQ. Mods, you may of course feel free to move this.
Anyway, to cut to the chase: The Straight Dope Message Boards rule. It’s head and shoulders above any other board I’ve visited. The vast majority of the posters seem to have much to contribute, and there is quite a strong sense of community here. And of course, the discussions at GD, and even in the Pit are positively fascinating, the stuff in MPSIMS and the Pit is hilarious, and the Cafe Society is a great addition to this site. Simply put: I love this place.
Now for the question: Are there any message boards on the Net that DON’T pale in comparison to this one? I guess I’m looking for even more places to read and post, and I’m quite tired of all the stupid boards I see out there. So, does anyone have any interesting links? I don’t expect anything as good as SDMB, but a board that ranks as a distant second-place would be cool to visit.
The “strong sense of community” is a little hard to define. Granted, I don’t see it everywhere here, but there’s definitely something like that going on. I mean… DOPEFESTS??? What other message boards have anything even remotely like that?
I’ve never seena message board that even begins to approach the SDMB, and Usenet is a wasteland if stupidity.
But if you want sports discussion, Fanhome is pretty good. It can be a little juvenile at times but you can get some pretty good discussions and insight there.
In terms of lighthearted chatter with rather intelligent people . . . the Gay, Out, Loud, Proud board over at TMF (www.fool.com) is a great place. They need their own subdivided fora, really.
Mostly politically and philosophically oriented, but much more in depth (at its best) than most of what’s here, and the amount of the good stuff is much greater, too. Not much sense of community, though.
There is a huge quantity of total dreck, though not nearly as much as on AOL’s politics boards.
Email her and request permission real nice–she’s heavily armed. It’s her board so she has resticted the registration to people who haven’t pissed her off.
Friend of mine does a good message board that posts topics relating to being gay. We also do a lot of chatting about politics and rock music (hey they are about 19 on average) http://www.voy.com/12478/
No guys, you haven’t pissed me off. I had to ban whole blocks of IPs in August to prevent my server from being flooded with Code Red attacks - which, although I was safe from being infected, were stealing about 90% of my bandwidth. I’m guessing you guys use cable modems, perhaps…? If you can e-mail me your IP address that you are trying to connect from, or, if you don’t know that, try to connect and tell me the exact time you tried, I can un-block you in short order.
Sorry for the inconvenience. It was only temporary, and I hoped that anyone who was illegitimately blocked would just mail me.
Old stuff from the exit76.com location hasn’t been archived yet, so it’s a brand new board, but with many of the same people. Some Brunchers are secret Dopers, and some Dopers are secret Brunchers, so this seems as good a place as any to put an extra shout out.
