HAHA!
And stop quoting entire OPs, damn it. Especially when you’re the first to respond.
I tried going to the TWP forums. Other than that, I’ve never really been anywhere except here.
:smack: That’s so me. I’m so, so sorry, and I promise to try to attempt to consider stopping. My brain just won’t grasp the difference between “Reply” and “Post Reply.” I swear, I’m kicking myself every time I miss it on preview and notice it once it’s posted.
Drives me bonkers when people use no punctuation, no capitals and no spaces between paragraphs. My 30 year old eyes can’t make a bit of sense out of that, and I know I’m not the only myopic person here. I’d almost be happy if they’d just insert a carriage return randomly, every four lines or something. It’s just so hard to read a huge block of text.
The Avatars that are about 3 pages long scrolling down, when their only response was LOL or OMGROTFLMAO.
Text message speak. Surely it takes far longer on a keyboard to type that shit than it does to spell correctly.
I’m looking at YOU Blazin’ Squad forum.
Anybody posting about how good the Libertines are
Oohh, I forgot 25-post pages too. Especially when they’re all “LOL” “OMG dat wuz reet.”
Give me the SDMB and 50 posts worth of content on each page!
Txt tlk is evl.
Seriously though, it’s done on other boards, and is VERY annoying.
I have a music friend who maintained two message boards on his site (one message board with 2 forums), and one ‘group’ of people (3 people with about 15 demonstrable screen identities) have managed not only to destroy a formally lively, thoughtful, intelligent discussion forum, but at the moment, because of their nastiness, have brought the site to a screeching halt.
Whilst those people are annoying, the gripe I have is the complete lack of moderation. My friend hired a guy to maintain the site and moderate the board – the guy has a stranglehold on the message board as a result. He changed all the passwords so neither my friend nor the other mod can get onto the site ( :eek: ) – and at the whim of this clique of people, this guy will edit and delete anyone’s posts as the whim suits him, and allow obscene, rude, and just all around nastiness to remain – IF it was posted by one of those three people.
If anyone complains about the clique’s behaviour or criticises this moderator, they find themselves banned; this moderator is also well known for sifting through my friend’s private emails and spreading the contents around amongst this clique. He also gives out any registered message board member’s emails, and members of this clique will them bombard that member with hate mail and rubbish. (The thing is, they’re not only mean, but dumb; many times the hatemail has been traced right back to their IPs.)
The ringleader of the clique is a woman very much as Zoe describes above; she’s managed to infiltrate and smash to bits several other discussion boards.
Gah!!!
There’s more, but just had to vent a wee tiny bit.
I hate it when message boards have an edit feature that allows the whole post to be deleted – I HATE that! I sometimes yearn here for an edit feature, so I could go back and correct the occasional typo or brain-fart-induced spelling error, but not if it allowed people to delete their whole post.
But the thing I hate worst on other message boards is the inability of so many to argue politely. So many of the boards I go to feature vast hoards of posters who honestly believe that polite disagreement equals vicous insult. And I don’t even go to political boards. It’s so frustrating.
Example: on an etiquette/ wedding planning board I frequent, a bride came in wondering how she was ever going to afford her wedding. She is a 20 year old mother of two on welfare whose fiance is out of work. She is planning at least a $2000 wedding ($500 dress, several bridesmaids, dinner, DJ) in one year. She got one sympathetic response (cyber-hugs, and ‘poor thing’ comments), two posts with suggestions for a budget wedding, and two (one of these was from me) perfectly politely worded recommendations that she go to City Hall and get married because she clearly couldn’t afford a wedding right at the moment. She responded back with a complaint about “all the negative responses.” In response to the second post she got 6 positive posts – one with sympathy only and 5 with suggestions, but all of them including regret (and, often, cyber-hugs) that she was upset by the ‘negativity.’ She also got one more post from me, stating that I did not mean to insult her, but to offer practical advice. I also explained that I had followed my own advice 19 years ago and married at City Hall because we didn’t feel we could afford a wedding. There was one more post agreeing with me and including a fairly gently worded (but still, IMO, inappropriate) reproof about “taking tax money to pay for a wedding.” The OP responded with an irate post complaining of “being blasted” for posting a simple vent. In response to this third post she received 8 more symathetic posts with cyber-hugs and kisses. Meanwhile on another thread she complained of being vicously attacked in this thread, then came back and deleted her second and third posts completely and replaced her OP with a promise to only write "posts that people won’t be so judgmental about " in the future. In her world, apparently, 4 ‘negative’ posts (and I reiterate that these posts were worlds removed from even the most gently worded BBQ Pit flame) completely cancel out seventeen gushy, cyber-hug infested lovefests. Bleah!
The fact that this silly stuff doesn’t go on here is Reason Number One why this is the Best Message Board Ever and why I’m willing to pay to be a part of it.
[ul]
[li]Other boards I’ve belonged to have areas that are, in theory, like GD except people are allowed to say stuff like “Well my neighbour’s grandson’s girlfriend’s stepfather’s co-worker’s brother says that grass is orange and he should know, he’s a trash collector and sees lawns all the time” and that is considered an airtight, unquestionable cite and there’s simply no point arguing with it, end of story. I don’t really debate here, but I do enjoy reading GD. Elsewhere, I get seasick from rolling my eyes so much.[/li]
[li]Another thing I enjoy about the SDMB is that there are fewer people who type incomprehensible sentences, misspellings that would make your head burst or even suffer from an attack of the random apostrophe. Yeah, it happens and we all make mistakes, but there are fewer of them here. When a short sentence is constructed of common English words that are each less than six letters long, and most of them are wrong, it’s depressing. I picked this gem up yesterday from a thread talking about a tv show:[/li]
The poster who wrote this is also unable to spell “our”, “husband” and “Thursday”. She’s (allegedly) 25 years old and English is her first language.
[li]Drama queens. Someone known to people on one of the other message boards that I’ve been a member of was unmasked as an imposter. Yeah, I understand why they were a bit upset about it, but frankly [/li]1) The woman was a bitch and half of them never liked her in the first place - some didn’t even know her
2) She didn’t actually belong to their message board - they’d previously all frequented the same place but it had closed down and she’d moved on elsewhere
3) She was really very pathetic, inventing a fantasy life because her real life was so very ordinary and depressing.
4) Once she was exposed, she apologised and left.
The members just went nuts over it, talking about how they’d never trust anyone online again and how she had ruined everything for them because now they were questioning the identities of all their friends, how they felt personally hurt and betrayed by her and how nothing in life would ever be the same now that they had had their innocence so brutally injured. Puh-lease. If the worst thing that happens to you this year is that some bitchy cow on a message board turns out to be a pathetic loser in real life, then you don’t have anything to complain about. There are certainly drama queens everywhere you go, even - shock! horror! - here, but the mods would stamp on threads like the ones that spawned on the other site, especially when the members started egging each other on to use what they knew about her to find her real address and workplace and dob her in to her employers and make her life miserable :eek: I even saw an Administrator post a link to the girl’s profile on an employment board and then delete all traces of her post once several members responded that they’d fired off complains accusing her of fraud, mental illness and child abuse (!) to the admins of the employment board.
[li]The volume of glurge and urban legends posted elsewhere is frustrating; the outraged members rallying to defend it from any well-intentioned Snopes link is depressing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’ll never understand why people would rather believe a lie than learn a truth.[/li]I don’t know what your experience of the Straight Dope has been like, but in my experience the mods are mostly fair, and while they may be more patient with a long-term poster who has misbehaved in a manner they consider out of character, they generally don’t really play favourites. This has not been my experience on other boards where the mods often have a select group of friends who can do no wrong and will always side with them. Beyond that, there’s a whole world of drama and intrigue that I was only vaguely aware of when I belonged to the board that closed down, where they banned people for minor infringements and others without even giving a reason. Some of the banned people started their own board, and so more members were banned for joining up over there too. I’ve heard accusations that some people were banned over things written in Private Messages that were intercepted and read by management (I don’t even know if it’s possible, but it’s one of the stories going around). If that sort of thing goes on here, I’m not aware of it![/ul]
It’s a toss up between this and chat-speak for most annoying thing on boards. I think the block of text wins when its a coherent, interesting post, but a block of text at least 50 lines long. At least the chat-speak I’ll just skip anyways most of the time (very rarely is there anything worth deciphering, especially after I have to dig out my decoder ring and reread the secret spy manual to figure it out).
But I really wanted to read that essay on Troy and Worf’s compatibility*, and there is no way I am sitting here and forcing myself to read that. When you can’t indent, a single return is useless, and the reader some form of blank space to be able to read it comfortably.
- Example. There is no essay. Unless there is. In which case, let me know
Nondescriptive thread titles. For example:
"What’s your favorite … " Favorite what? You have to open the thread to find out!
"This doesn’t really belong here but … "
“OMG OMG OMG”
“OT, sort of”
“Everybody please read!”
OT threads that are not labeled OT. On-topic threads that are labeled OT.
Animated smilies.
Sigs. I hate even short sigs.
Stupid people who can’t even figure out how to click on the quote button but have to reply to every thread with their vapid one-liners and huggles which they accidentally double post and follow up with “sorry about the double post 
:(” instead of deleting the duplicate post or preferably not even making the stupid post in the first place.
[ul]
[li]Hijacking threads - It amazes me that here on SDMB a thread can be 3 pages long and still be on subject[/li]
[li]People constantly griping about the spelling of losing when spelled as loosing - Get over it people, this word is always going to get misspelled - I’m referring to a fitness board[/li]
[li]Responding that the content of a previous post is a bunch of marlarky because that poster posted as an “anonymous” user[/li][/ul]
There is one guy who has written a five-message post on his weight loss success - very inspiring - the first time you read it. Unfortunately, at every chance, he copies the same post (he has it saved on his PC, I’d guess) onto a thread. Now, given, it can be insightful to someone who hasn’t seen it the first time - but I hate having to page through his posts to find if anyone else has something to say that I haven’t heard before!
Susan
[QUOTE=Rock n Roach]
[list]
[li]Hijacking threads - It amazes me that here on SDMB a thread can be 3 pages long and still be on subject[/li][/QUOTE]
Hey, let’s go ride bikes!
Yes, yes, yes! A specialty board in which I have participated for years has digressed away from discussing tea cozies (which we really don’t discuss, but I’ll stay with the example) to discussing, in very strong terms, American politics and the upcoming election.
Gone are the days when we could ask questions about tea cozies, show off our knowledge about tea cozies, or arrange meets at which we could display and trade tea cozies. Now it’s all political mudslinging, and any attempt at introducing a discussion of tea cozies devolves into a discussion about what Bush/Kerry would do about the tea cozy situation. At least here, the mods keep everything on track: debates go in GD, personal attacks go in the Pit, and so on.
I’m staying away from there until after the election. Thank goodness I can take refuge in the SDMB.
I now rarely frequent a board which had become a place like you speak of, Spoons. I was one of the first members, and it was a blast. Now EVERY thread ends up in a political slamfest. No thanks.
I also find the “Mom” boards annoying with their abbreviations. DH/DS/DD etc. If you’re griping about them, they aren’t dear.
cazzle , I’m guessing the letters MOL might mean something to you.
MissTake , you know “d” can stand for “darn” too! I’m not one to ask for the pukey smiley, but I could do with one right now.
The list is endless.
Moving graphics in posts. Overuse of smilies and color.
I come originally from usenet, so:
Top-posting
Munging
HTML posts
Then I went to some web-based poetry boards and became a mod, so:
Overly aggressive modding
Lack of modding
Crying to mods
But the things I really hate aren’t what people do, it’s software, so:
Boards where you can’t tell if there’s been a reply to your post
Boards where you can only tell if there’s been a reply if you memorize the time stamp of the most recent one
Boards with no email notification
Boards where there is email notification, but it doesn’t say who replied or what they said (yes, I’m spoiled rotten!)
Boards where you can’t turn off sigs
Boards where you can’t turn off graphics
Boards where you aren’t required to register in order to post
Boards where the most recent thread doesn’t pop to the top of the list
I’m lazy and I’m on a slow connection at work. That means time wasted re-opening threads is time that could have been wasted opening a new thread. I love America.
I hate when every thread turns into a love-fest. Sure, people have problems, but the whole {{hugs}} thing really gets on my nerves. It happens sometimes on here, but it’s way worse on other forums.
Women’s health forums are the absolute worst. I went on one when I thought I might have to get a hysterectomy and it was so saccharine that I had to leave. I don’t need teddy bear-heart-star-glitter icons to express how sad you are for me and my uterus. I just don’t get all mushy like that, especially not on a messageboard full of strangers.
I occasionally read and post to a board that’s for locals - about the counties in this area. There have been some threads that are helpful, like about restaurants, dentists, auto repairs shops, and the like. However, the one social forum is barely above a chat room. Threads are titled “Hey <insert poster’s name here>!!” Sometimes there are half a dozen threads like that, things that should be handled by phone, especially when you consider these people all pretty much live within a 30 mile radius and do hang out together for real.
They’re also quick to jump on newbies who make common newbie errors, making snarky remarks like "That’s already been discussed here and here, linking to 2-year old threads. And they have animated smiles and obscenely long sigs… I generally only refer to that site when I need specific area info. Socially, I want nothing to do with those idiots!
This has been a great thread. I having nothing truly different from the above to add, except to say this: the SDMB is the only public message board where I consistently think it’s worth taking the time to wait for the smilies to download.
So many others are filled with little more than immature, nasty crap.
Yay for the SMDB!
