The Bloody Boards: a tale of the Internet age

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Today Cracked.com had a list of the 7 most unintentionally creepy places on the Internet. Not one of their best nor worst pieces but one of the entries was The Bloody Board. The Bloody Board (no sense linking since, as you will see, it’s down) was basically a thriving Internet community of one person about Buffy the Vampire Slayer in general and Spike in particular.

Nearly every post on the board (almost 40,000 total over the last few years) was by a person screen named jamie_marsters. The board was full of threads with posts complete with replies all from this one person. It’s not as bad as it sounds as most of the threads were generally news stories but the fact that it was all in vacuum is a little weird (I was able to browse the site this afternoon before it died).

So you have a weird little corner of the internet, so what? Well the publicity from the Cracked story carried over to other web sites and the trolls came. They deluged the board with post after post of insults, racist garbage and porn links, finally (based on some comments I saw on the Cracked site) whomever jamie_marsters is, she shut the site down.

No real point to any of this (other than the internet can be a crazy place on many levels, I guess), just thought it was interesting and decided to share it.

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That’s actually a pretty good idea - at least from a certain perspective. I read a lot of stuff on line and never had any way of keeping track of it reliably. I run 4 computers and I can be on any one of them reading a story, article or whatever. Sometimes I would email things to myself, but that’s tedious. Now I use the firefox plugin “read it later” to keep track of hundreds of articles and sites that I think are worth remembering. But if I had thought of using my own private forum for this purpose, I think I might have done something like that. It’s especially perfect if you want to make notes about particular items - you just put each in a thread and then post a reply to your own thread. It actually makes perfect sense.