The SDMB is my “other” MB, I mostly lurk here rather than post, and I do that less and less because the italicised font hurts my eyes (I crtl + A, copy, paste in Notepad and read), and to tell the truth there’ve been times when I’ve deliberatly not posted on this board because of the attitude of other posters, why is everyone here always so angry? I thought the Straight Dope was about improving people’s knowledge of the world around them… not bickering about smiles 
Don’t you hate people who end their posts with smilies!
:eek: :eek: 
Umm, no Must be more than one other message board full of disfunctional people, unless I’m overlooking something very obvious that I should know!
[QUOTE=cazzle]
[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][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][/li][/QUOTE]
Too long, didn’t read it.
What!?
I really appreciate you sharing that, Indygrrl. Though separated by the oceans and the genders, I sense a real connection with you and that’s precious.
Meh , a thread that just screams to be graped
Declan
Pregnancy boards are interesting. It seems like every fifth thread is by some teenager who thinks she might be pregnant. That wouldn’t be so bad, except these girls aren’t really paying attention in sex ed class. They’ve either had their periods since the last time they had sex or didn’t have sex in the first place.
My all time favorite was the girl that was wondering if she could be pregnant after using Saran Wrap instead of a condom.
The use of multiple smileys in a row should be a bannable offence, I reckon. It’s worse on other messageboards thank god, because the few people who think that posting 5 rolleye smileys in a row makes for a good discussion makes me wish harm upon their connection every time.
This hasn’t been mentioned yet:
When a suitable response for a debate or discussion consists of posting a link or thumbnail to a graphic that’s supposed to represent a clever retort, such as a steaming cup of coffee and the blaring text HAVE A CUP OF SHUT THE F––– UP, or the picture of Carrot Top and the huge text LOSER, or anything similar.
I’m so glad that doesn’t happen here.
I hate excessive moderation. On so many sites the moderators take absolute delight in their ability to banish users from the board. Or when someone starts a new thread looking for information, their thread is closed and they’re linked to a locked, year-old thread that doesn’t even answer their question exactly. Also many of the other boards I post on are liberal circlejerks. Now I’m pretty liberal, but I think the whole fun of debating other people on the Internet is that those other people have views that are contrary to yours. At one board I post at, a poster got banned for being anti-abortion. Now to be fair the person was being an asscake about it, but people were jumping on them from the start, saying the equivalent of “we don’t take kindly to you folks around here.” Most of the other boards I post at are very slow because of this overmoderation and tendency to cut conflict off at its head. I like conflict; it would be so boring to be surrounded by people who only want to confirm their own opinions over and over.
I am also very happy that this board doesn’t allow images. A few might be nice from time to time, but allowing pictures can get out of hand very easily.
The only thing I see that’s negative about this board (so far) is that there’s no edit feature. But I can see why it’s not there, since on many other boards people will use the edit feature to delete their post or backpedal. Well, also that it’s a pay site. But you get what you pay for, I guess.
A lot of what you described sounds like stuff that went on on a now defunct board with the initials MOL is all.
The baby name folders of pregnancy boards are also filled with what seems to be teenagers (or younger) who all claim their sister in law or someone is expecting quads and who want to know what we all think of the names Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn or some dumb crap like that. I mean what are the odds of all those quads?
Italicised font? What italicised font? I don’t see anything italicised unless someone has specifically used the bracket-I-bracket tag. I.e., this.
Angry? I suppose in the Pit and GD there’s a lot of anger, particularly with partisan bickering, but it sure is far better behaved anger than 99% of the rest of the net.
Or did I just get whooshed?
Err, unless you count the font inside of quote boxes, of course.
The SDMB was the very first message board I ever saw. I was initially confused about why people would be discussing whether the Enterprise could beat a Star Destroyer, and totally thrown off by the discussion about the usefulness of a T. Rex’s arms, but at least you guys were speaking English. The very few other boards I’ve seen since have had me recoiling in horror at the abuse of the English language. Not even leet, just such terrible syntax, grammar, and spelling that it made my head hurt. Apparently only here is it understood that your post must be readable to have much validity to the discusion at hand.
I think a well armed T-Rex commanding the E series Enterprise could handily beat even a fleet of star destroyers (those poor, unnamed ships), Force or no Force.
That’s true. I go to a bicycling message board where everyone is soooo positive to everyone else.
There was a thread one day about “what inspires you to ride”. I opened it thinking I’d see something about pain and sweat and riding faster than other people.
It was all about “little timmy the cripple” and “my cousin with MS. I ride for him.”
Another bicycling MB is much more cynical. And better.
As someone else said, I hate when I see this. . .
:this post edited on 10/27/2004 at 2:52 PM by Trunk:
The ability to edit posts is the worse.
Phew. I was thinking that I’d been a member of that other board for three years and missed some vital piece of information regarding the letters MOL. It’s good to know it was a different board!
I think a lot of what I griped about goes on at many places… with the possible exception of the moderator-endorsed stalking of trolls, but I could be wrong about that too.