Dammit, you were supposed to make me feel BETTER! Gah. My maternal grandmother was a nurse (LVN) and while she was religious, she wasn’t a Creationist. I was raised to respect nurses. I still respect most nurses. I guess every profession has its less-suitable members.
Qadgop the Mercutan pointed me to http://www.nurstoon.com/
I don’t know why so many message boards are so very bad.
I don’t know either and it worries me a bit. I really hope that the percentage of jerks and very stupid people online isn’t representative of the general population. Maybe a lot of boards are purposely designed to attract those that want to use the cover of anonymity to unleash their jerkiness but I doubt that anyone is faking dumb on purpose. I almost never meet people like that in real life but I’m starting to wonder if I’ve led a sheltered existence by always hanging out with the same kinds of people.
With smaller boards, I think the owners are afraid they’ll lose what little traffic they have if they try to control the jerks. It doesn’t take long for the jerks to take over. Some big boards have a lot of traffic but no moderation. I used to hang at Stephen King’s forum on the Simon-Schuster site, but last time I was there, it was all fan-fic. HBO’s boards are awful too. I had so many people set to Ignore on the Deadwood board, there was nothing to read.
I’m surprised: Fanfic is technically illegal (it’s copyright violation, because you invariably use copyrighted characters and locales, and possibly trademark violation if they took the trouble) and is often cracked down on pretty hard by rightsowners (publishers, distributors, other licensees). That doesn’t stop popular series from accumulating their share of fancruft (some of it better than the original properties) but I’d have thought the publisher would’ve been interested in stopping it on their own site. Good for them and Stephen King that they encourage fans to be creative.
Anyway, I thought of another fairly readable message board: Fark is pretty good for a laugh and some reasonable (albeit off-the-cuff) commentary on the news stories they post. It has the ambiance of a bar or a college dorm with a fairly intelligent and literate group of regulars.
sigh Me too. The draconian rules never bothered me…I appreciated them. I made thousands of posts and never got Winged so it’s not too hard to live by the rules.
Gresham’s Law of Internet Forums: Bad posters drive out good posters.
A single unnoticed lower case letter will let the rest of the text be all caps, such as substituting l for I.
Well, actually the SFRT on the old GEnie system ruined forums for me. SDMB is pretty close (as is the SFRT’s descendent – with many of the principals – at sff.net). The discussion here is good, though, but when you get a bunch of pro writers posting like at the SFRT, it’s even better.
To be fair, being a Creationist whackjob does not preclude you from performing well as a nurse. Nor does collecting angels of mercy tchotchkes etc.
It just makes you hell to talk to on a personal level.
I’m a member of a Starcraft clan that’s been around for 9 years now, and I don’t spend much time there anymore largely because of this reason.
In other news, great Venture Brothers reference in the OP!
I have dipped my toe into the water of parenting/pregnancy boards- Og they are awful.
Between the harpies who denounce every pregnant woman not eating an all organic wholefood diet while chomping down handfuls of multi-vitamins and avoiding anything that even contains the same letters as the word “listeria” and the “i’m thrty9!!! weeks pergntn…my belly is sore and i think peed myself…wot is gng on!!!
” idiots I have my work cut out!
I really, really like Something Awful’s forums. They’re pretty fiercely moderated, and people who can’t capitalize/punctuate are soundly mocked.
You know I eventually had to go and seek this one out, right? The curiousity was just killing me. :smack:
Something Awful’s book forum is fantastic. Very well-read, well-rounded, articulate people abound there. I cannot speak to the rest of the board, however.
Television Without Pity I also enjoy, but it could really use a Pit forum. Their “no boards on boards” rule is often a blessing, but damn, if I could tell a few people off for being women-hating, illogical, dead-horse-beating fucks, it would be a good day indeed. Also, they have no rule against sock puppets or against returning under another name after you’ve been banned. Then again, moderation is so arbitrary that you might get banned for no real reason. It can be a frustrating place.
Without putting too fine a point on it, IME the percentage of jerks and stupid people you bump into online is underrepresented, mainly because a lot of stupid people are too intimidated by fancy things like computers, much less the interwebs. I spent the first two or three years after college coming to grips with the fact that the construction workers I was dealing with on a daily basis weren’t actually morons but rather, they were just average people. This revelation shocked and horrified me to the core of my being. To this day, I am frequently amazed that average, everyday people I come across in my daily life have the faculties to find their way out their front door, much less construct an intelligent comment on a message board. Or maybe I’m just a major snob who looks disapprovingly down his nose at anyone who doesn’t know the difference between “less” and “fewer.”
I just finally got fed up and left another board in which I had participated for two years. This was one of those sites where members were encouraged to make the hugest sig lines they could and where there was an entire forum devoted to threads that consisted of one word – or one smilie – responses. The board’s primary focus was poker and it had its origins on one of the online poker sites that I used to spend a bunch of time on (pretty much broke even there – Woo Hoo!). As the board’s membership grew, the number of sub-forums and the range of topics expanded dramatically. Struggling to muddle through some of the point-free, punctuation-free, logic-free content was as painful (and rewarding) as stepping repeatedly on a rusty nail. One of the key issues there was, as AuntiePam suggested, that the moderators (the owner especially) were loathe to ban anyone for any reason. Consequently, assholish behavior went unpunished and intelligent posters would eventually walk away. When I finally left, the official membership was around 1,500, but there were only maybe 80 active posters and virtually every person I respected on there was long gone. About the only remaining posters were the flat-earthers, the reactionaries, the bigots, and the conspiracy theorists. And the morons, of course.
Being back here with the smart people – even the ones who piss me off – is so delightfully refreshing! 
The moms and moms-to-be may want to try local-type boards. Try Craigslist, maybe? I am not a mom myself, but a couple of my friends who are are active members of local email groups of mothers. One of them has been emailing with the same moms since she was pregnant with her now-nine-year-old son.
Try Code RN2
I lurked for years at misc.kids.pregnancy (waving at **Chotii **if she’s still reading), the only sane pregnancy board I ever came across. It declined majorly (spam and trolls up, real posters down) in the last few years. It tended toward the crunchy-granola end of the spectrum, but mostly people there were respectful and informative. Many of the regulars there were real gems.
I’m on this forum, Ars Technica, and the JREF forum. Aside from the occasional waste of oxygen, they’re all good. I can’t stand forums crammed with morons, and don’t bother with them.
With all the ridiculous spelling and grammar snobbery here, you’d think most members would be able to distinguish between its and it’s, but they can’t. I think people make more of an effort here because they’re afraid to get mocked but a bunch of losers with nothing better to do, not because it makes for better communication. I’ve seen people copy others’ mistakes here, which would seem to support this theory.
Right, and nobody gets snippy for the distinction between its and it’s (unless they’re already being snarky about something else; it’s like the seatbelt ticket of snarkery). Because most of the time, it doesn’t really get in the way of communication. Something like this, though: “ps: i am a 12 year old girl i swear i look what i can do ok! love u lots good luck with the new child or not??” As Bites, says, what does that even mean? It’s not the spelling - other than u, everything is actually spelled correctly - it’s the utter incoherency of the “sentence”.
Spelling and grammar are correlated with poor communication, and if they’re really bad, of course they cause poor communication, but really, if you can communicate clearly, we’re not *that *picky.
(Notice that only once in all my years here have I been snarked at for my atrocious overuse of commas, for instance.)