Things I'd like to see when/if this message board says "Buh-bye"

Yes, but it’s not very active.

Brilliant.

I don’t want the board to end. It should live on, like SNL.

Thus. the title of the thread.

A couple random brain cells sparking prompted me to remember that there were two spin-off sites. GB and… Mellophant (née DoMeBo) Which I’m surprised to find is still on-line with at least a little activity.

Those both started the same weekend in 2009, which was strange. A lot of people thought the SDMB might get shut down. I know I was worried. Clearly it is still chugging along.

There were a few other boards even before that pair. Something like UnaBoard, SkipMagic had a board, something tied to Opal on Livejournal I think and the Snarkpit. Also a Straight Dope Alt.group going back to the 90s I think.

GB & DoMeBo/Mellophant had a friendly rivalry. I can speak from experience that the Admins at GB really helped out when DoMeBo looked like it was going to fail.



To the OP, @Czarcasm, I can check if you’re on the top 10 ignored. Do you want me to PM you or post it here?

I remember a huge amount of board drama that week. There were some new, very poorly received rules (at least as I recall it - I actually don’t remember why so many were so upset) that capped of a longer period of simmering resentment. I thought at the time there was enough groundswell that the Dope might actually be supplanted, but in the end, neither board had the critical mass that would have required.

I even recall returning to Usenet to test the waters, but both alt.fan.cecil-adams and alt.folklore.urban were wastelands.

A stat I’d like to see on some sort of hypothetical ‘last week’ would be how many times I saw a glaring typo in a comment of mine seconds after the edit window closed.

Yeah, dammit, I hate this too and it gets worse as the years go on and my eyesight gets worse.

You can post it here if you want…but If I turn out to be #11, I don’t wanna know. :grin:

Ah, the go Big or Go Home POV. No one wants to be an also-ran.

This is only since June of 2020 of course. (When we went live on Discourse)

You are 23rd all time or 17th among unbanned posters or 14 among active posters.

So not 11th.

Of the top 50 ignored posters, 17 have been banned. 6 just stopped posting.

Giraffe has just such, note, called “The Box”.

Out of curiosity I wandered into the Snarkpit one day.

I quickly left and never came back.

I have no one blocked and really have no interest in who was banned over time. I wouldn’t even remember who they were or why they were banned anyway.

Two days before the Earth Shattering SDMB Kaboom, the mods can ban without reason any posters they want. No total Board Bans allowed.

I don’t have any poster blocked, but I do have a specific word that begins with T and ends with p blocked, and I have muted the P&E forum for mental health.

I would think a sudden shut-down of the SDMB would drive active users over to another board - I am not sure it would be appropriate to discuss a diaspora like that before it happens, or where we all would go.

Is there any impending sign that some event like that may occur? Is the SDMB known as a hotbed of “radical” ideas that may blip on some Project 2025 radar? What’s up?

I realize the thread is meant to be lighthearted, not a serious discussion of serious options.

But IMHO if the board does shut down, the first anyone other than Ed will know is when we all (admins, mods, and ordinary schlubs) start getting server errors instead of Discourse pages. It will go from fully alive to fully dead at some moment forced upon Ed by the real Powers That Be: the ones with the money.

It’ll be an instantly fatal bolt from the blue clear sky.

Right now things seem stable with ownership but one never knows.

We’re pretty small fry on the scale of things Politicians would care about.

So I at least am less concerned than 16 years ago.



With any luck we’ll have a little warning if the board was being closed, that actually seems more likely than we’re just gone.

Just remember that “small target” can also mean “powerless and easily stopped target”.

No disagreement, I meant we’re probably flying under the radar at this point.

In our heyday we got astroturfers, now all we get are spammers and a rare crank. The SDMB is a lot smaller than it was and message boards are largely considered functionally extinct.

I guess we’re the AOL of message boards.