All of them.
(Edited to Delete the name of a board I am consistently disappointed by. Hint: it’s attached to a satirical publication and is full of AIDS jokes and lame ‘I’d hit it’ comments – a sad contrast to witty, insightful articles.)
It amazes me at the number of idiots on some boards that will post to a thread just to say “First bitches!”
Seriously, it makes me want to weep for humanity.
There are a couple of gaming boards I read that actually have a lot of intelligent discussion, and are quite active (I’m looking at one now, and there are 2853 currently active users). One is a general forum about games and the gaming industry, and threads often go to 100+ posts with a lot of interesting opinions. The other is aimed more towards collectors and hardcore enthusiasts, and a lot of people there have real encyclopedic knowledges about all things gaming. You can get a lot of cool recommendations for what to play there.
I guess I’m not allowed to actually name them, but there do exist high-quality video game-related message boards.
Boards associated with reality TV programming are not the best. Boards associated with video games involving music are grisly, since people can argue about both the game and the music in it, both separately and together.
Board that caters to the heavy metal/hair metal/hard rock crowd. Never seen a more hostile, homophobic, and downright mean bunch of people in my life.
Video game boards are definitely nasty, at least for competitive multiplayer/MMO games.
I’ve noticed that some newspapers’ letters pages often read like bad message boards, only in extra-slow motion.
We’re not allowed to even discuss other message boards on the SDMB? Seriously?
We don’t want to start board wars. If someone searches for the name of a message board, and gets a hit on the SDMB, they might come here and start a board war. Czarcasm is insisting on people not mentioning specific boards by name. I think that I avoided doing this in a previous post, as I mentioned that there were player run boards set up by players of a specific online game, but I didn’t mention WHICH player run boards I had a problem with, and there are, or were, lots and lots of player boards.
I post these vids when I get a chance because they are funny I love sharing them they are relevant to my interests and this thread.
NSFW[Language]
As to post 15:We didn’t start the flame war.
At least horrible message interweb comments stay on the net.
I wonder what percentage of dopers will get 100% of the references on these vids. If you do you probably have been spending way to much time like me on the bad “genra” boards.
To directly answer the OP I am going with the bodybuilding genra.
The bodybuilding boards are great for information about bodybuilding, and for encouragement. There’s a “rep” system where people “rep” your posts if they like them, and “neg” them if they don’t. Therefore there’s a lot of petty bullshit feuds between people; the negs or reps are represented by green or red dots under the username. Some other boards do this too. Generally if you’re mature and polite, you won’t get much abuse, but teenagers with attitudes (90% of the people on bodybuilding boards) who say stupid things will get “negged” and then neg others back, etc etc. There’s definitely a sort of code of deference to older people (meaning anyone over 21) - as long as you write in a mature way, people tend to respect you if you’re older than them. Any teenager who makes up shit about how much weight he lifts, will quickly become persona non grata.
Most of the discussion not directly related to bodybuilding is pretty low-grade and immature.
There’s a website that serves the tri-county area where I live and it includes a messageboard. I found it and joined before I moved here 5 years ago, hoping to maybe meet some people, learn about the area, and feel part of the community. Silly me - I was expecting something similar to these boards.
What I found instead, apart from the occasional helpful thread, was snark, flirting, insults, intolerance of anyone not part of the in-crowd, racism, homophobia, and general unpleasantness. That’s not to say that the area reflects such things overwhelmingly. It’s just that the messageboard seems to attract far too much of that. I’ll occasionally skim the thread titles and find something useful, but for the most part, I just avoid it.
One example - I has posted a question about a local business or service or something (it’s been years, I can’t recall the specifics) and the 2nd or 3rd comment I got was “Are you chubby?” 
Yeah, very helpful. Not to mention completely within the subject I was asking about. :rolleyes: And I lost count of the threads where a newcomer to the area was attacked for not knowing that the thread asking about recommendations for dentists was already addressed 4 years ago…
The title of this thread explains what the topic is.
Parenting boards make me weep. Years ago when my kids were babies there was a woman who was not being successful breastfeeding. She had a toddler at home and a baby that wouldn’t latch. She was pumping and feeding the baby with an eyedropper so the baby wouldn’t get nipple confusion when the baby latched. The baby was six weeks old, so this had been going on for some time. She was exhausted, for six weeks she’d pumped and fed the baby with an eye dropper, getting in naps in between. Her husband was in charge of the toddler when he was home, and her mother was over, but was going to have to stop being there every day. And her pediatrician was telling her she had to use a bottle because they baby’s health was suffering, he wasn’t gaining nearly enough weight.
And the breastfeeding board told her to find another pediatrician and that she was doing the right thing. The medical establishment was evil and anti-breastfeeding.
I think that was the last time I posted to a “Mommy Board” that was nothing but Mommies.
Most gun boards are hives of idiocy. There is no other explanation for angry, vitriolic threads pages long on topics like 9mm v. .45 or AR v. AK.
Gun boards also tend to have a high population of right wing Xians. They seem to believe that since you share their beliefs vis a vis the 2nd Ammendment, that you also share their other political and religious beliefs. This leads to them being insulting without them specifically meaning to be. Thankfully, there has been an influx of younger members in the last 5 to 10 years and the gun-owner demographic is starting to iinclude a more diverse selection of people. On the boards, anyway.
There is one gun board that is pretty progressive. I don’t know if I should mention it by name or not; I’m not criticizing it, so it wouldn’t be starting a “board war,” but the instruction was to not mention ANY other board - it didn’t specify whether it was ok to praise one board but not OK to slam another. So in any case, I will just say that it was started by a Russian-American photographer, and that it is pretty progressive and very friendly to people in alternative subcultures. And there are lots of pictures of hot chicks on it.
Never heard of it 
Major MMORPG boards usually (in my experience) tend not to be overly hostile because you have a strong number of people who view it as a community and try to mitigate the jackasses. “Minor” MMORPG boards such as independently run server boards, guild boards, class boards, etc are anyone’s guess. I’ve known a couple class boards that got to be useless for anyone who wasn’t a career end-game type player. “Hey guys, can anyone help me on this lvl 38 quest?” “Your gear sucks, why don’t you have this stuff from this lvl 65 raid? And you shouldn’t even be questing because you’re worthless until you’re level 70, etc etc etc”
That board has recently suffered a schism due to disputed ownership. It is actually operating as two separate boards with only slightly different names. There was a schism amongst the moderating staff too, with some of them going to the “new board” and some staying at the old.
The new board is considerably less civil than the old, and the old isn’t as pleasant as it used to be. The loudmouth Xian righties have felt freer to bray about liberals, Muslims, Gays, Democrats, illegal aliens, etc. with fewer moderators to ride herd on them.
From my brother’s comments about the message boards he frequents, I’d have to agree with the OP.
Mama’s Fallen Angels seems to have a fairly friendly general tone. Oddly, it seems to be mostly populated by 17-year-old girls with crushes on former lead singers who are now paunchy and balding.
I’m aware of that issue; I was spending a lot of time on the board when it happened. At first, I frequented both boards at once, under the same username. I just figured, you know, two is better than one. But I quickly started to notice the growing differences between the two. In this strange case, the “new board” is actually more in the spirit of the “original,” since the certain Russian-American photographer was in charge of the new board while the old was appropriated by his former webmaster, or something. (I was always slightly confused by the drama.)
After a while I started posting on the .org board only, because there was just more activity on it. The latter is now MUCH bigger, with MANY more posters, and a great deal more activity per hour. But the moderators on it are totally out of control. They close so many threads, it’s absurd. If there is even the slightest, tiniest bit of discussion in a thread that’s “not gun related,” it gets shut down ASAP. So after a while I got quite disillusioned with it, and went to the “new” board, actually closer to the “original” in spirit because the creator of the original board is now there. The moderators are way more tolerant, and it’s just overall a better site, but doesn’t get as much traffic.
Both these boards have explicit rules against engaging in board-wars, and their members are not really the type to do that anyway, so there’s not much harm in talking about them here. But I’ll still refrain from naming names.