Mundane and pointless ahead, but if it gets interpreted as a pitting I can come back and add profanity.
I try. Lord knows I try. I go to the website, and it’s good. It seems tailored to me. It has a forum, and there I find a vast number of people who understand the subject and have interesting and provocative views about it. There are even often a bunch of the bells and whistles that vBulletin has to offer in its later versions, some of which don’t make me want to punch the monitor.
Unfortunately, I can’t read the posts. I get to the end of “so i new we ware going to loose the itemsby than and, deccded we need to…” and hit the back button. I try another post, but that guy doesn’t believe in the shift key. The next one couldn’t get to subject-verb agreement with the help of Dr. Henry Killinger and his Magic Murder Bag, everyone treats punctuation as a sort of Pin the Tail on the Donkey (thanks for the image and congratulations, Sir Pterry), and somehow it has become an article of faith that more variety in font size and colour actually helps your argument.
Any assistance in removing the stick or turning the internal spellchecker off would be greatly appreciated, as I am perfectly willing to call this my own problem and am now down to two fora I can stand to read.
It would also be appreciated if the children could remove themselves from my lawn at their earliest convenience.
You forgot to mention the sig files, which often take up half a screen and detail the poster’s relationship to every member of his/her extended family…including the animals.
You know, I keep seeing people saying other boards are wastelands of poor grammar and crap spelling, but I can say I’ve never actually seen it. Granted, I don’t go to places like 4chan, or somethingawful, but even going to communities full of adolescents, it’s not so much with the tipin lyk dis, unless it’s a deliberate affectation.
I’ve left a couple boards for being full of idiots, but it was for much less obvious idiocy than that.
Gaming forums are notorious for being nearly unintelligible, even without quasi-l337 speak and “in-game” code/slang. Some of them are worse than the YouTube “comments” section, if that’s possible.
I’ve found most of the military gun collecting forums are pretty good, provided they have an enforced “NO POLITICS!” rule.
Otherwise, yeah, I’m pretty much here most of my forum-browsing time for much the same reasons as outlined in the OP (Go Team Venture!)
No kidding. Even in game forums, which are in my experience not full of rocket scientists and where there are often people with English as their second or third language, posters are rarely even so bad as the OP complains.
Something Awful is actually pretty tame. It’s kind of like the dope with more trolling, granted there’s a BIT more of the bad grammar and such, but given the lack of a don’t be a jerk rule people tend to get very, very badly ridiculed for it (At least in the Let’s Play forums).
The messageboards I go to most often outside of the SDMB are for 3D Graphics, and the worst I see there are people from non-English countries, because they’re so often so damned good at CG modelling. They struggle with English sometimes, but I figure they know my language better than I know theirs, so it’s no big deal to me. Generally everybody’s spelling and grammar is average to good, and there’s usually no big spats going on between members or against moderators, so it’s good.
I used to be a member of the forums pre-TWOP (they were Hissyfit and Fametracker) but left them alone when they started to demonstrate elitism at an alarming level.
I keep up with a few Usenet groups (comp.lang.lisp and alt.folklore.computers now, more in the past and likely more in the future) and I find them to be very readable and full of quite reasonable English. Even spam isn’t a serious problem in those groups.
As far as web boards go, I’ve given up on Slashdot entirely but Reddit is fairly nice. Both Reddit and Slashdot are community-moderated, meaning everyone (potentially) has the ability to upmod and downmod individual comments, leading to the most-downmodded disappearing from the default view. In Slashdot’s case, the system has apparently stopped working under the barrage of trolls and other morons, but Reddit still has interesting threads. (I think Slashdot fails partly because it hands out ‘mod points’ too stingily, only giving active members sporadic 48 hour runs to moderate a total of five posts. Reddit, on the other hand, allows all logged-in members to moderate all posts, meaning members that want to moderate don’t get discouraged by not being able to, and that the power of moderation is open to a very wide group all the time.)
I can’t stand having to dig through 5 line sigs for a one line post that ends up saying something brilliant like “lulz, u r pwned”. When I’m looking at new forums there are a few things that I look for right away to see if I want to register at all. Textspeak, rep points, more juvenile and tasteless humor than true wit, lots of trolling and drama and bling that I can’t hide are major turnoffs for me. Endless bitching about forum management and an obnoxious sense of entitlement annoy the shit out of me too. (OK, I’m a completely burned out ex-mod and I’m tired of people bitching about what they get for free).
On the other end of the spectrum, forums that take themselves so seriously that a slight bit of thread wandering is a crisis and joking around is frowned upon bore the hell out of me and constantly tempt me to troll those with a stick up their butt.
I gave up on two different nursing boards because I realized I couldn’t fix stupid. It wasn’t so much the poor grammar and spelling, it was the defiant ignorance in the face of facts. That, and the insistence on dragging religion into practically everything. There were other issues, but those were the ones that tipped my hand.
I do read some public comments on various sites like Newsweek or BBC or DailyKos etc. It’s a real mixed bag, and not all that impressive-not the political views so much (although sometimes that can be it), but more how they’re expressed/understood. Sometimes it’s just depressing.
Yes, this. I’m a member of another board where people have huge sig files, complete with animated pictures, scrolling text and blinking graphics. And they use their sig in every damn post.
It makes me appreciate the Dope more and more every time I go there.
The spelling is bad enough, but what I really hate Is When People Type Like This. Who taught them that capitalizing every word is an appropriate way to type?
The huge sig files get to me too. I just love seeing “me too!” followed by a signature that takes up two screens worth of scrolling. Yeah, your kids are cute and your dogs are nice, but do the pictures have to be so stinking big? I also believe Facebook Flair should stay on Facebook, but then I might be weird.
For a couple of months, I got into Yahoo! Answers, mostly in the parenting sections. Finally, like eleanorigby, I realized I couldn’t fix stupid. I swear, if there was one more “OMG COULD I BE PERGNENT?!!!” question, I was gonna scream.
I think we’re on the same board. I’ve not only seen both of these happen, but then u hve ppl hoo r tlkn lk this lol. I also just read a post with one 250 word run-on sentence. A period is not just something that happens once a month, people.
The one other forum I read regularly I can only read posts by certain posters, because they actually understand how to write. When did people decide that there’s no space after punctuation?
There’s one good Thundercats forum, but it’s all taken up with stupid game threads.
eleanorigby, please allow us to have our illusions about nurses! I, for one, want to believe that every nurse I have contact with is a sane, intelligent person. Particularly since nurses have access to so very many sharp pointy objects…or objects that aren’t sharp and pointy, but are terrifying nonetheless (catheters, anyone?).
