Heh, I don’t think we can reasonably expect most people to have the mad coding skillz displayed by Sarahfeena. Even for those who could do it, it’s far too labor-intensive. (Though I appreciate the aesthetics of it.)
This definitely points out one of the nice effects of the SDMB settings not showing quoted text in the “Reply with Quote” feature; you can’t add nested quotes unless you really go out of your way.
Something that drives me nuts on other forums is what I think of as “delusions of grandeur” - too many sub-forums for the relatively low amount of activity that they have. In fact, it seems like a webforum rule that the less activity a board has, the more sub-boards it has.
There’s a webforum for a cool independent publisher that I like that has a sub-forum for each author that they’ve published - so it’s something like 50 sub-forums, each with maybe one or two posts in them from the past six months. Just make one mega-board and be done with it!
That’s funny to me, because I am an idiot when it comes to this kind of stuff. But once you learn how to do it, it’s easy. You are right that it’s labor-intensive, but it’s not hard.
You just paste all the quotes. Then put quote tags around the whole thing. Then put quote tags around all but the first one. Then put quote tags around all but the first & second ones. Then put quote tags around all but the first, second, and third ones. Etc. Then you add the poster names to the quote tags.
The only other board I frequent does the nested tags for you, in the style I demonstrated. It does occasionally make the posts way too long, and I don’t think it would work here because the conversations are too long & complicated. But on some other boards, it is really helpful.
I’m fully with you on this one. I’d associate posts with individuals, and build up rounded mental pictures of them, far more easily if avatars were involved.
I wonder if they’re dealing with vanity publishing, part of the sales pitch being a ‘we devote a whole forum to your books’ kind of thing?
There is only one other forum that I am a member of, but I am liking it less and less. Why? Because almost 90 percent of OPs are merely links to youtube clips asking what you think about them.
Here’s how it goes:
I see an interesting title, open the thread and it’s:
What do you think of this: (link to youtube clip)
No explanation, no opinion about it. You have to go watch the clip to see what they are asking you about. It has turned into a site about nothing except your opinion on various video clips.
Which is disappointing because it’s the only other message board with people close to the intelligence level of the SDMB. (that I have found)
Collector blowhards. You’ll find them on boards dedicated to cool old stuff and the knowledge thereof. The blowhard type holds a death grip on both his stuff and his knowledge, and posts to boards mostly to talk himself up and put others down.
The territorial call of the collector blowhard is to tell someone “[Collector] don’t know his ass from Thursday about [interest]. I know.” He then proceeds to make some bald categorical statement unsupported by any evidence. Because you’re just supposed to believe the guy.
Extreme heavy-handed moderation. On another board I lurk it, which does not need to be named I’m sure, GOD FORBID you stray off topic for even a sentence, or speak about the boards on the boards (I don’t even understand what the purpose of that rule is, but you better not do it dammit!), or accidentally double post, or use incorrect grammar one too many times, a mod while be by in about thirty seconds flat to lay the smackdown on you. The reason I just lurk and don’t even try to post there is, honestly, who has the energy to keep up with all that crap?
Unfortunately, several of the rules on my board deal specifically with annoyances.
“Roll call,” “consecutive number game”, “last poster wins”, “99 bottles of beer”, “control-v”, and “increase your post count” type threads and posts.
A URL alone, with little or no commentary.
Two or more consecutive messages in a thread to reflect one train of thought.
Short followup messages that contribute nothing to a thread, such as “I agree” or “Me too”"
The regular users actually like the rules, and they’ve helped to keep the level of discussion fairly high.
Some of my peeves that wasn’t mentioned by other Dopers:
Well maybe it’s one of those things I love to hate but Nerd Rage does it for me. Gaming forums alternatively have me shaking my head in disgust and laughing my ass off at the petty complaints, dick waving, drama whoring and general I-am-a-waste-of-life posts.
Petitions. I hate it when someone has some bullshit petition that goes on for 500+ words then the first dozen replies will be the whole god damned thing quoted with a /signed or /agree at the end.
I’m sure there’s more but that’s the only things that’s annoyed me recently (well other then the ongoing battle with spelling/grammar I know I’m not perfect but at least I try to write coherently with as few spelling mistakes as possible)
I had been thinking that our outreach program to the internet community was feeble and lacking. I am moved to reconsider that position.
In no real order:
The people who put up ads.
The people who post in a non-Latin alphabet when the board specifically says not to.
The off-topic crazies.
The on-topic crazies.
The “me, too” posters.
The posters who fraudulently claim to be moderators.
The feuding ex’s who harass posters.
The guy who wants to be your friend for no good reason.
One board that I used to be a member of had these internal cliques that made posting like walking in a minefield. Most of the posters were reasonable and liked lively conversation and debate, but the cliques reacted to any dissent to posts made by the clique’s members like it was the worst insult ever.
The problem came when one clique would invade a thread - there wasn’t really any indication that it was happening, just another post would show up, and then someone else would respond to that, and suddenly there’d be this huge pile on and accusations of trolling, name calling, claims that the responder wasn’t “a real member”, and the whole damn thing would go flying off the rails and the mods would have to shut down the thread.
It got so bad that the people running the board decided they’d had enough and shut the whole thing down. That was annoying but it increased my productivity 300%.
Then I found this place.
I don’t post at any other boards at the moment. (I have in the past and I will in the future. Just not right now.) I’m more active on Usenet, though, and no Usenet regular is ever without his list of what annoys him about it.
[ul]
[li]Top-posting: People who put their replies above what they are replying to are even less likely to have anything to say than a howler monkey watching porn.[/li][li]People who kill forums: Unmoderated newsgroups don’t die naturally. They don’t even get killed by spam. They get killed by people who use special software to flood-fill them with nonsense text and make it too hard to find human voices.[/li][li]Trolls: Whole newsgroups exist specifically to allow trolls to plan their raids on other newsgroups.[/li][li]People who misunderstand free speech: It is probably a good idea for companies to make sure people who could be construed as speaking for them don’t post long diatribes denying five genocides and saying ten others didn’t go far enough. It is certainly a good idea for at least some newsgroups to be moderated. James Madison would rip off your head and shit down your throat.[/li][li]Bigots: There are reasons people who advocate stoning people who don’t look like you have so few friends. Doing the digital equivalent of standing in front of someone and screaming like a Parris Island pimp who just lost his doll is twenty of them.[/li][/ul]
The thing that bugs me most on other forums is just the general shitty standard of contributions. Take Yahoo Answers, for example - supposedly a GQ-like forum, but there’s just so much nonsense, misinformation and jibberish there, the whole thing is totally pointless, for example:
A question from the ‘Earth Sciences and Geology’ section:
When earth is round ,totaly wecan see the map under sea water. why sea water goes down what is the reason?
I can’t be bothered to go looking for any typical answers, but very often, they’re just inane bollocks like “becos if it wasn’t like that it would be different” or “god made it that way so there”