While I admire the astounding breadth that SDMB has, there are some topics which tend to be answered better on more specialised boards. The level of obsession and geekery about a single topic can sometimes be astounding.
Anyway, what boards do you know of that have intelligent discussion about topics that interest you and preferably have a decent signal-to-noise ratio?
For cooking, I love eGullet. It’s an absolutely amazing resource filled with both industry pros and dedicated home chefs. The number of wacky, obessesive and generally just plain mind bogglingly good food that those people put out is nothing short of amazing. It also has a very admirably high level of discourse, moderating is strong and trolls are discouraged.
For mens fashion, A friend tells me Style Forum and Ask Andy are the only two worth bothering about. Sadly, the level of discourse is quite shoddy.
For technical discussions about technology, I used to frequent Anandtech Highly Technical but the quality has really dropped dramatically in the last few months. I haven’t yet found a replacement.
For programming issues, the comp.lang.* newsgroups aren’t too bad. For unmoderated usenet, the number of trolls is surprisingly low. But it still doesn’t beat a good message board.
I’ve heard from a friend that theres a yahoo group that several fairly prominent evolutionary sociologists post on and I glanced through it a while back but I lost the link.
For Japanese questions, the Japanese Forum at Anime Lyrics (yeah, yeah, I know) is one of the most helpful (with native speakers) on the web. There’s also sci.lang.japan but it’s a lot less newbie friendly.
For cosmetics stuff, I like the forums at Makeup Alley.
For fashion and shoe trends, I check out the Fashion Spot.
For household stuff, That Home Site! is kinda old-school but very helpful.
People in the UK who use NTL for their phones, cable tv or internet can commiserate at NTL Hell with the thousands of others who realised the truth too late. Useful advice on managing the services and the customer complaint lines, etc. They even sorted me out by explaining how to get my browser to use an ntl proxy server in another city because the one here is crap. NTL wanted £1.50 a minute to give me the same advice.