Not only that, they once had an episode where a character died. they thought he was a lone and friendless but later found he had a huge on line life including a post on TWOP which they read in the episode. Rather than read a fake post, they took the trouble of creating an account for this character months earlier (when the episode was made presumably) and actually made the post they later read on the show. I thought that was pretty cool.
What does “GIFT” mean in this context?
I’ve been a member there since December 2000, and have posted almost daily. I have never received a warning there, but I agree about the strict moderating.
I will miss the site a lot and I’ve already registered at previously.tv.
FWIW, I think the SDMB could use a dose of TWOP’s moderation. There’s nothing I hate more than wandering into a thread here to find two posters going back and forth with an argument about the nature of arguments. TWOP also pooped on people who generalized (“We all know…” type of stuff) and people who trolled. Yes their mods were badass killers and tended to shoot before thinking (I even racked up two warnings there, for untagged spoilers and for discussing a preview in an episode thread) but the discussions were better for it.
I will miss them. Some of my best snark was on those boards and since they used a modern bulletin board software I could see that my posts were being appreciated by others. It was a good board and it will be gone before its time.
The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which has reached a certain level of meme-ness online.
And as I mentioned in another thread, I was banned from the forums there for what I thought was a relatively lighthearted and innocuous post. Not sure how I feel about it right now; I don’t read it nearly as much as I used to because of the above.
What was the “Fametracker meltdown”?
They’d ban people for signing their posts, for correcting someone in an argument (that’s how I got banned from Hissyfit, then I was banned from MBTV for PM-ing a mod I was friends with to ask why I was banned, since no one told me why. The admins wrote me a really nasty e-mail about why I was banned, I basically said, “fuck you”, and left.), and someone on Snopes said they had something called “Bitch Week” when Wing Chun just banned everyone she didn’t like.
They were…pretty anal. Great site, but the stick up that woman’s ass had a stick up its ass.
I never got into the forums - I’m a one-forum guy - but I used to read the recaps religiously. Not so much in recent years, though. In the past, they seemed to either really like the shows they were watching, or really *wanted *to like them. Now they seem to watch them out of spite.
They changed ownership at one point, didn’t they? I think that’s when things started going downhill.
It was good. Hardly watch movies at all these days, and not a lot of television, but the reviews were pretty good and the specials (“Which idea should be a movie next?” and the like) were always entertaining.
Forums were some of the better ones I’ve visited. Some smart, funny posters there, and I never read anything that I felt was really out of place. I know some of you have chafed at how tight the moderation was (I noticed that they’re completely merciless about staying on topic), but you know what, I’ve seen too tight and too loose, and I’ll take the former over the latter any day. (Having experienced the nightmarish chaotic hellhole GameFAQs degenerated into because some bleeding heart thought it was “too strict”, which I experienced every step of firsthand, I’ll admit to a bit of bias here.)
Visited it for Hell’s Kitchen, mostly. Learned quite a bit about it, in fact, and yeah, it was a lot of fun seeing reviewers and posters alike eviscerate it. Often more entertaining than the actual show.
Not happy at its passing. Plenty of sites that deserve it a lot more, that’s for sure.
Hissyfit and Fametracker were the boards that got me turned on to message boards in general. I’m almost positive that I found the SDMB through FT. I miss them!
The infamous FT meltdown was laugh out loud hysterical. I had saved, for years, a thread that had something to do with Jesus as a celeb. Wish I could find it. It was fricking hilarious.
I’ll try the new website, for sure. I’m a TWOP registered user but I never really interacted with them. However, I did enjoy, as others have mentioned, reading the forums on shows that I do watch. Especially the TAR threads and stuff about TAR-con.
Glad they found a new home and I’ve bookmarked it already.
Found it…but it’s a Word doc and I don’t know how to link to it!
Good.
Bunch of soccer moms obsessing over homoerotic tension any time two male actors were on the screen. It was a silly place.
I used to read religiously - this really makes me sad. I loved the ridiculous overwrought Battlestar Galactica recaps by… Jacob, I think? God, they were unintentionally hilarious. I used to read them aloud to my ex. What am I going to do now if I need a good example of somebody who isn’t anywhere near as smart as he thinks he is?
I stopped reading & posting at TWoP years ago, although I’d been there since it was MBTV. The fora were great on the smaller shows, but an absolute horror on all the popular shows. Threads would grow multiple pages every minute the night a new show aired – all full of a seething stew of word salad as hundreds of flaky posters wrote any random thing that came to mind just to get in on the action.
I think the draconian moderation came about because TWoP had so many posters on the popular fora that it really had no effect on the site content if they banned hundreds a day. And, really, sometimes the moderation needed to be even more draconian. There was a lot of dumb flying around in some of those threads.
But TWoP threads weren’t liable to be dominated by a few shrill fans or shrill critics of a show, as they can be in Cafe Society. The Battlestar Galactica show threads had a full range of opinions (even if they grew too fast to read). And you could have really good discussions of old or obscure shows; we had a great “let’s watch” of Band of Brothers, years after it aired.
Actually, thinking about this, I’m wondering what kind of a trainwreck the TWoP threads on Game of Thrones must’ve been, seeing how crazy the spoiler policy here on Cafe Society had to be to satisfy the various posters.
I’m curious about the “Fametracker meltdown” too. I didn’t know there was a meltdown, I just saw that they had stopped posted stuff and didn’t know why.
ha! that about sums it up!
You want to talk plot points, they want to talk about Castle & Beckett’s wedding venue. And cake design. Or whether Captain Raydor and Flynn are going to get together. Or if Agent Moretti is going to hook up with Daniel or go back to her ex. They do come across like soccer moms with nothing in their lives.
It was Jacob, and he did the god-awful Doctor Who recaps as well.
My understanding is during the last few days of the Fametracker forum, the mods basically abandoned everything and let the trolls take over. As a result, silly threads such as the one for Jesus Christ in the Celebrity section were started without the mods quickly clamping down on it as they had done in the past. The closure of the forum (which had been announced several weeks before this happened) wiped out all these threads and posts.
I always thought Jacob was fantastic. I loved that the more inane a TV show was, the more intensely he’ philoso-psychoanalyze it. I watched a whole season of Celebrity Apprentice just for that. Until my brain leaked from my ears.
I haven’t read the site in years. I guess they lost their relevance.
Sort of like the SDMB’s Lost Weekend?
In a way but with the Fametracker forum, it was intentional.
I am assuming, however, that none of the threads and posts on the Fametracker forum were archived somewhere on the web.
Are they going to keep the site up for posterity? I’d hate all that content to go away. I will occasionally read a recap of a classic episode, or when I started watching a classic series, I used TWOP ratings as a judge of which eps to watch.
Too bad, but it was the page load that did it in for me way back when.