Just a newby exploring the board…I figure I should know the rules.
Here in the “About This Message Board” forum. They’re posted as “stickies” which stay at the top of the forum.
Registration Agreement, Rules, and FAQ
New rules and corrections june 27, 2020
I have migrated here from a much larger board…got tired of all the politics and politics have gotten very depressing.
How many viewers or approx. number does this board have?
Has this board really been around since 1973?
I didnt know the internet was that old?
No, the Straight Dope was a newspaper column that began being published in 1973. The columns were later collected in book form. The message board was created for fans of the book.
Welcome to the board! It’s an interesting place.
Click on the ‘Hamburger Menu’ at the top (three bars ☰).
You’ll find links to the FAQ and About.
The FAQ has the basic rules, and in addition, each category (or forum) has it’s own rules in pinned messages. You can unpin the messages by clicking on the pin icon.
But really the FAQ contains the main things you need to know. Everything else is the finer details.
The About page has a list of moderators (note that a number of them are not currently active), and below that Site Statistics. ‘Users’ means new users in that time period, and ‘Active Users’ means the number active in that time period.
So 1.2k in the past 24 hours, 1.6k in the past week, 2k in the past month.
If you click on Users in the Hamburger Menu, you’ll find stats for individual users by time period. Click on the column headings to sort.
It’s also well worth going through all the options and preferences in your Profile to set things up as you want them, and switch off notifications you don’t want. You can also mute Categories you’re not interested in.
Clicking on the links for the rules, once I got below this level
and tried to click on each rule, it said that the page doesn’t exist.
I’ll try to fix the links later. But they actually just link to posts in the thread.
ETA: OK the 14 page links are fixed. I’ll try to find the other 2 threads.
IIRC, the message board itself has been around since 1999—or a bit longer, if you count the old AOL forum that it arose from.
Or course the AOL forum counts. If it doesn’t then the Ketchup Wars were fought in vain.
We don’t talk about the Catsup Wars!
(Now I’m intrigued I joined in 2001 and lurked in 2000, but never heard of the Ketchup Wars, are they real?)
It was an old old old joke on the AOL forum. I don’t remember the original threads. I believe there was one about whether it was spelled catsup or ketchup (and whether they were two different things) and one about whether mustard or ketchup was a better condiment. There were long arguments about these issues and many people (or Manny Peoples) became annoyed and/or bored with. So it became a running joke that any threads on the topic of ketchup were forbidden.
There used to be a thread listing some of the board memes and where they came from that might prove handy, but I can’t find it now. Among other things it included,
- Hi, Opal!
- Winter of missed content
- Cow-orker
- Duran Duran
- For 20 minutes in 1960
For the love of Og!
Gotcha ya, thanks 
Go to the FAQ sticky at the top of ATMB and search for “glossary”. You’ll end up here:
Cool, I didn’t remember that thread. I just added a link to it in the FAQ thread.
Intriguing and enlightening, but I noticed a few anachronisms like references to vBulletin features and some outdated instructions (like volunteering for Staff Reports research).
I went through it and fixed everything that I noticed. Let me know what I missed.
By the way, @engineer_comp_geek, thanks for all you’ve been doing for the SDMB.
I think you got everything I saw. 