In the pit, i see several thread titles that start with “RO:.” What’s the RO: mean?
Recreational Outrage
Recreational Outrage. Basically, someone reads or sees a news story and gets upset about it. RO alerts you that the terrible thing they’re ranting about didn’t happen to someone they know personally.
The message board has a permanent sticky on common terms.
Beginner’s Guide to Glossary of Terms on Straight Dope Message Boards
The implication is that the person is posting just to express how appalled they are by something. If you’re posting about some serial killer murdering a bunch of women it’s not like anyone is likely to offer an opposing opinion. So the threads are usually:
“This is really horrible. Here’s a link.”
“Wow, that is bad.”
“I agree. How can people do things like that?”
“Horrible.”
“Terrible.”
“Disgusting.”
“Another vote for horrible.”
etc.
Because this is about the board and not a general factual question, I’ll move it from General Questions to About This Message Board.
Gfactor
General Questions Moderator
well, except for the occasional thread that veers into black humor and morbid puns.
It’s generally violence porn fetishists mentally masturbating over the horror-du-jour (“OH! MI! GHOD! THIS IS THE SICKEST THING EVEARH!”/“Oh yeah? HOW ABOUT THIS?!?!?!”/“OH! MI! GHODD!! SOoooo GRoooooooosss! What’s WRONG with HUMANITY?!”) and trying to top one another with their faux compassion (“This person I never met died in such a horrible way that I’m going to have my ENTIRE WEEK roond, but hey! there’s another one of those threads that I can open and screw up another week with!” or “Those people are so, SO sick. I’d NEVER do ANYTHING like that because I’m a better person!”)-helpful hint? If you need to say you’re better than the guy who puts kittens in a clothes dryer filled with nails, then there’s something wrong with your life.
The threads belong (in as much as they belong on the board at all) in MPSIMS, not the Pit since they’re just people congratulating each other other about being better than serial killers or topping each other with faux outrage, but there’s a long standing tradition of them being in the pit.
At least in the pit, the ROers can be made fun of though.
PS–everyone RO’s once in a while you stumble across that one story that happens to push your exact button…but there are people who make careers out of it.
Occasional?
Nicely done. 
Well, I guess you could, but you could get Pitted for it. It’s threadshitting, according to some, donchaknow. And evidently there’s Pit etiquette to follow as well.
I don’t know what the actual rules are about it, but making fun of ROers has had a bad reaction in the past.
No rant here, but I’ve seen a number of threads with “RO”. What does “RO” mean?
It means the poster should be in MPSIMS, or not at all.
Thanks, but that doesn’t answer my question. Specifically, what do the letters R and O mean? I.e., what words do they stand for?
Recreational Outrage
Recreational Outrage.
Okay, thanks. I haven’t frequented the Pit for quite a while. When did the use of RO take hold?
When the "mods’ stopped moving it MPSIMS, or closing the thread althogher
And that’s when Carol’s outrage mutated from casual recreation to a full-blown addiction.
Sometime in 2007 there was a flood of RO threads in the Pit that sparked a backlash. It was around that point that RO began to be commonly used in thread titles. It stopped being used for a while, but appears to be back.