I was on a brilliant usenet forum that died because of trolls. One member decided to start a web-based board with the same people and it became very popular for a couple of years and is now dying due to heavy-handed moderation. Surprise.
For those of us who knew the brilliant anarchy that is usenet, it’s funny to see people whine about trolls and insults on a moderated board. Usenet was a very different, very scary place. I loved it.
I used to frequent a board (still do, actually) that was of the Something Awful/Ebaum/4Chan variety. However, with the rise of 4chan and a few other similar sites, the site I am part of has dwindled in both quantity and quality.
Oddly, I am fairly certain there is another poster from there that posts here, as I’ve seen some astonishingly similar posts of the years, but nothing I can really nail down.
(armbar!)
This is the same message board where **The Superhero **and I met, and I found the SDMB the same way, through clairobscur (hi, anu-la! hi, caprese!). The two downfalls of the message board were a) the original owner sold the site to a company that would never update the content of the site, so new people stopped being attracted to the site and participating in the message board, and b) the main splinter site (where a good chunk of the group siphoned off to) was run by a woman who died of cancer. Further splintering occurred, and I think a few of the splinters are still limping along (as is the original message board, but with about 1/100th of the original membership).
The alt.comedy.improvisation usenet group was quite lively in the latter half of the 1990s. An influx of spammers and an unsuccessful atttempt at reorganizing as a rec.group led to a migration of virtually all the regulars to the YESand.com message boards circa 2000. These boards crashed in 2004 and after about a week’s worth of repairs, it returned with about 70% of its old members.
It crashed again last December. A new provider has tried rebuilding it, but it’s so ugly and sluggish at this point that it’s effectively dead.
In The Legend of Zelda circles back when Triforce Rumors in Ocarina of Time were somewhat hot there was a somewhat active, slightly famous board by Video Gamer X that managed to die TWICE. The first time (“Khakain”) the board got tired of his dictatorial policies and packed up and left, making their own board of the same name. The second time, the new boards (Which I was on) came to be called “Emo Khakain” because we followed his rules and ended up actually being infiltrated and destroyed (but this time partially due to server issues), nonetheless there was some subterfuge and infiltration from original Khakain that took it down. Old Khakain actually exists again, with a somewhat more insular community than it had before (it’s no longer oriented on VGX at all, in fact he’s a bit of a punchline there, and the Zelda/Odyssey of Hyrule boards which made it somewhat famous in Zelda circles are pretty much dead), but it exists and I caught up with an old e-friend from that board there recently, though the unmoderated nature is a little 4chanish for my tastes so I didn’t stick around. But yes, it’s not only happened once, but TWICE, on the same board.
Back in the Win '95 days, I used to hang out at a street rodding message board. Some guy with a street rod shop though that it would be a good idea to have a web presence. He didn’t see any sales, but he kept the message board running as a courtesy to us. There was a wealth of knowledge there, what fits what, how to tune engines, and enough lore that the board generated at least one book of short stories.
After about ten years, we got into a board war with a rat rod message board, then a couple of “American-only” guys started insulting foriegn cars. One of the big guys there was a rep for a Japanese car company, and he left in protest. Several other people also quit over the mess, and the owner pulled the plug a month or two after that.
I never understood the big deal about trolls. If people ignore them, they go away out of frustration. Usenet had a lot of spam, definitely, but that’s a different story. That definitely needs moderation.
Well, it’s been at least 10 years, and one of the dudes I’m talking about is still there.
He would spoof other people’s posts, change names constantly, etc so that killfiles wouldn’t work, etc. You can’t ignore someone who is truly dedicated to killing a usenet forum.
He also started calling me at work, threatening to come to Ohio and rape and kill me. A very high-class guy.
Rock band. You know - “White Punks On Dope,” “Talk To Ya Later,” “She’s A Beauty”…
That’s not been my experience. A hobby forum I moderate (the largest and best of it’s kind around here) has seen it’s share of tenacious, even perennial trolls: people who comment on every thread, have they something to say or not, or whether or not anyone responds to them. When every topic every day is headed with long, tedious drivel by the same poster, and no suggestions or threats to the troll have any effect but to increase the output, it becomes a real problem. Like trying to hold an interesting conversation while some lunatic keeps on shouting in your other ear, going off at tangents from whatever you say, and talking to himself if you’re silent. People will soon find another place to talk in, unless trolls are dealt with. Applies online and offline.
This wasn’t rec.music.alternative, was it? In that case (if not the one above), most of the posters drifted away right at the time that alternative became mainstream. Used to be a pretty vibrant place.
Several of the satellite radio messageboards have all but died off. Since the merger, there aren’t the endless, “XM is better than Sirius” discussion threads. The merged company isn’t adding very much new programming so there aren’t many speculation threads on potential new shows. Most threads are now bitchfests about how someone misses his favorite channel or how much they don’t like the merged company.
It’s not exactly a failure, but I noticed that messageboards devoted to obsessing about getting into school tended to have really high turnovers of “generations”. Basically, a strong community forms among people applying that year, once they get in, approx. 95% of them leave. There are the few 5% who hang around being friendly/condescending/helpful to the next generation, but for the most part, people jump ship en masse after the first couple of weeks of school. Not after the acceptance letters roll in-because from that point to the first day of school everyone has to fight amongst themselves about the best computer, laptop backpack and prep books/courses. The one I’m thinking of in particular was Princeton Review’s law school threads (I’m sure they have a different MB format than they used to in 2001). Have no idea if they still exist-I’m sure they do but they’re probably in a different format than when I was posting on them.
Emotions run high during that year and there’s also a lot of petty in-fighting and sniping once acceptances roll out, which sometimes results in people leaving in a huff.
My favourite moment from the PR Board in 2001-2002 was when this military guy claimed to have gotten into Yale with a 158, was roundly abused by the frequent posters, the whole issue of LSATs in applications was hotly debated for 2 months before he reappeared and then FAXED his acceptance letter and LSAT scores to some people just to rub it in that he did get into Yale with a much lower LSAT score than everyone else claiming to be attending a Top 25.
The Lycos chatrooms more or less died out in 2001-2 or so. Does that count?
That’s twisted, man. :eek:
It’s the fax part that’s getting you, isn’t it? I think today everyone would get their spitemail through attachments. 
I wasn’t thinking of chat rooms because they’re fairly ephemeral and generally full of bots and crazy people (IMHO), but I’m told that 99% of the Yahoo Chat Rooms are completely filled with spambots and haven’t had actual people in there chatting in years.
I was an Admin at a P2P message board that got quite popular around 2001-2002. However the owner sold out and it was no longer supported.