The message boards of snarky websites like Fametracker and TWOP do have a tendency to be Exhibit “A” examples of the GIFT so I did cut the mods some slack there. That being said, the last days of the Fametracker message boards were perversely fascinating in that was like the internet equivalent of the Fall of Saigon with the trolls taking over and anarchy reigning.
I was never crazy about TWOP’s recaps; too often they just seemed like snark for the sake of snark.
What I grew to dislike about the forums was the herd instinct, particularly in the Survivor threads. Over time, the TWOP crowd grew less and less tolerant of anything resembling proactive gameplay, and the regulars repeatedly asserted that the only “correct” way to play Survivor was to fade into the woodwork and never talk to anyone.
The moderation was a little overzealous, but I didn’t mind that. What I thought was bizarre was their ironclad rule against “boards-on-boards” discussion. In other words, the first rule of TWOP is that you never talk about TWOP (and no talking about other boards, either). I understood the rationale behind the rule, but it really felt excessively confining.
The owner, a division of NBC (IIRC), said they’re not making enough money.
i got hooked on the recaps of trading spaces. i would tune in and out depending on what i was watching or not watching but needed to discuss with others. lately the sherlock discussions were interesting.
i’ll miss it.
TWOP is my #3 website (SDMB is of course #1). I have probably visited almost every day for the past 12 years. I never became a member of the boards, since I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of the moderation, but I did read the forums for dozens of shows that I watched that weren’t recapped, especially The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I also read recaps for many shows (although the shows that were recapped were generally not to my taste). I was particularly fond of the recaps for The West Wing (yes, lemonlyman.com was TWOP, a spoof of what happened to Aaron Sorkin when he started posting to the forums), America’s Next Top Model (a big factor in why I watched that show at all) and The Amazing Race, which I’m still reading right up to this week.
I will miss it.
Omg it was also daily viewage for me and i never got to post either just enjoyed reading the forums. Now I will have to tolerate imdb posts when they covered tv.
I think I’m cursed. Ever since I moved back to my hometown in 2008, it was the start of recession. Eight Barnes noble and borders stores closed around me, saw four grocery stores I visited close. Now a new fiesta I liked is closing after just eight months. My friends stationery store closed. One of the few harrahs casinos I visited, In tunica is closing. And now my fave site next straight dope is. Uh oh.
“Boards on boards” bugged me too. And Moderator Howard in the Real Housewives forums wouldn’t allow anything unrelated to the episodes, so if there was real time news about one of those wacky women, you couldn’t talk about it. I think she lightened up after awhile though.
My Name Is Earl did a meta episode where one of the show’s writers posted as “Joy” for awhile, after a character mentioned TWOP on the show. That was fun.
It was a good place to go if you thought you were the only one watching a show.
ETA: This is where the House Hunters viewers are emigrating to.
I used to like it in Mighty Big TV days, and the first couple of years after it changed to TWOP. The recaps were tighter, and oh yeah, ANTM recaps and a few others made the shows so much more fun to watch. I rarely posted in any of the forums, though the ones about the more obscure shows could be fun in the early days. The wedding and meltdown of Star Jones was fun in the forums. Haven’t been back in years, though.
I’ve been a poster on the TWOP forums for years, and today has been rather traumatic for me. I’ve started immigrating to previously.tv, which is actually run by former TWOPpers Glark, Tara and Sars, so the moderation there will probably be pretty much the same. I’m hoping it gains the larger share of the TWOP forum-posters.
I’m going to miss the recaps. They always seemed to point out things I missed and some of them were hilarious. I’ve been posting in the forums for years and was never even warned. I remember the great TAR threads where the former contestants would come to post. Now where will I go to snark on Sandra Lee the Semiho?
A lot of posters got warnings or suspensions for things like “boards on boards” (talking about other posters or the boards themselves), getting off-topic, stating an opinion as fact, etc. Some of the moderators were real nazis about it. It made people paranoid that anything they posted would get a warning.
The herd mentality was definitely a problem. I lurk in the Duggar Family’s 19 Kids and Counting thread, and it is quite amusing to see posters feeding off each other when it comes to outrageous explanations and conspiracy theories.
Our own Cafe Society TV show threads were more active in the early to mid 00’s. Too bad we can’t attract some of TwoP’s traffic here. We’ve got people who could recap as well as TwoP types. We get really anemic TV show threads for less than very popular TV shows.
The moderation was crazy, the commenters were crazier, some of the recappers were way too in love with their own voices, and it’s been spread too thin for too long.
But it feels like it has been around forever and it had a major influence on pop-culture/television writing and blogging and I’ll still go there to look at forums for shows that no one else talks about because there’s a forum for everything on TWoP.
It’ll be weird to see it gone.
Five years ago I gave up on TWOP because the page reload time was awful. Now if I’m looking for some discussion that’s not on SDMB I’ll go to AVClub.
I was banned from TWoP within a few weeks of joining, a million years ago. No warning, no explanation. I am really a very innocuous poster, never flaming, never cursing, a rule-follower by nature. I still don’t know what I did.
StG
That’s a damn shame. The recaps have deteriorated in the last year or two, but they helped me catch up on shows that I hadn’t watched from the beginning, like Doctor Who. And the Forums going too - that really bites.
NBC should have saved all that cash they threw at “updating” the Weather Channel and hiring a dozen new Nameless Mindless Females In Too-Tight/Short Dresses and should have put the money toward TWOP instead.
Bummer. 
I liked the site when it was Hissyfit and Fametracker. I never visited TWOP as it seemed to be obsessed with shows I didn’t watch.
Ever since, though a lot of people praised the site, I also heard a lot of people get bitterly annoyed at it, so I saw it as no great loss to my time-wasting. And then it got bought out, and then it lost its edge, and now it’s getting closed down. Seems to be the way of things.
I mostly lurked there but I liked it. I especially loved the fact that you could find a discussion of anything there on television. Even the most obscure shows had a thread. I particularly liked the mega thread on the Duggars. It was one of the few places on the net where you could really get away with making fun of Jim Bob and his brood. But I can see why it’s not doing well. The visuals aren’t particularly attractive.
I enjoy reading it more than posting. The rules are very draconian. I get it to a certain extent, but I think they go too far. We wander off topic slightly here, but things usually self-correct and even if a mod has to step in, it’s more like “hey guys, start a new thread, 'k?” instead of the “You will not even MENTION this or you will be BANNED!”
I read the Supernatural forum a lot and there are so many banned things. The show has been on for 9 seasons. God forbid you want to talk about something from S1 and how it related to an S9 episode. It just stifled conversation rather than making sure things didn’t go too off the rails in a “Sam vs Dean vs Cas: who is hotter?” direction. And, unlike other boards, you couldn’t say “Gee, moderator, chill the fuck out, ok?” on TWOP.
But I liked the recaps of the shows I watch and I will miss it. I hope that someone will pick up the site, even if it does have to change a little. The article I read indicated that the archives aren’t going to be destroyed, but aren’t going to be publicly available.
It’s a bummer, even if it wasn’t my favorite place online.
Aw, the boards devoted to savaging Sandra Lee were a lot of fun.
I also really enjoyed the recaps for the first couple seasons of Desperate Housewives. Just the right level of snark.