What's your worst experience with a non-Escapist forum?

[Alexander Bradley]

I recently had a bad run-in with the Newgrounds forum, when I decided to post a question on there. I'm sort of used to the nicer people here on The Escapist, so it came as a severe shock to me with how rude these guys were. I decided to post some music in their audio section, just in the hopes of maybe attracting new listeners. I then noticed that there was a download button that just allowed people to take my audio without my consent or even sending me a message.

I guess I must've overlooked a clause in the Terms of Agreement that states all music posted to the site fell under a Creative Commons License. I didn't find out until I posted the question on the forums and received a huge bombardment of insults. I can take some people being mean, but these people were down-right ignorant and rude about answering a legitimate question. I made sure to state that I felt I might have overlooked something in the ToA and that all I wanted to do was see if there was a way to disable the download button.

Needless to say, I'm not using Newgrounds anymore, considering how everyone, including the mods, ruthlessly kicked my teeth in for trying to get help. So what's your worst experience with a forum other than The Escapist?

Captcha: time will tell.... ominous much?

EDIT: Thank you so much, to those who posted! I'm sorry to hear so many of you had some bad experiences, but you definitely made my day better by sharing them with me! Keep posting if you like. You all are totally metal in my book! \m/ >_< \m/

 

[Daystar Clarion]

I wouldn't know

The Escapist is the first forum I found interesting enough to join.


She is my first and only love <3

 

[Randoman01]

The spacebattles.com forum seems to be pretty much filled with ***holes there. I Joined that site so I can ask crossovers and ideas that might be interesting. I got a few good ones but most of the time there were a few members that were jerks.

 

[Zantos]

I don't really have problems with other forums being rude, just inactive. Particularly webcomic forums actually. Exterminatus Now has a pretty good core of regular posters that I've settled into quite happily (there are a few who might not hate me), but before then I joined a few that I just stopped visiting because there were very rarely any new posts.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I've never really been active on any other forum but the Escapist.

Also...

10.000 posts, woooo!!!

 

[Tom_green_day]

Bioware Social Network. You say anything praising Bioware, Mass Effect (especially 3's ending) or anything at all and you are very quickly told how you are the scum of the earth and you need to die in a hole.
Youtube too to a certain extent, although that isn't primarily a forum. You say anything that isn't fanwanking the content creator (even if it has only tangential relevance to the video at all) and you're told again to very politely fudge off. Especially front content creators, actually.

 

[Berithil]

I wouldn't know

The Escapist is the first forum I found interesting enough to join.


She is my first and only love <3

Same here. I never really explored other forums all that much, and I never posted. The 'Scapist was the first forums I actually joined, and it's still pretty much the only one.

 

[Clowndoe]

A while back in the Company of Heroes forums the one moderator (it doesn't see that much traffic) went on holiday for a weekend. During that time, there were a swarm of threads that, whenever balance or something came up, ended up with statements that the Russians were evil people and that the game should portray the Germans as the good guys, so a bunch of obvious neo-nazis joined in, it got weird.

Also I got tired having to explain to everyone that the Red Square scene in the beginning of Enemy at the Gates and the first few levels of the Russian campaign in Call of Duty weren't good representations of Russian strategy.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Considering that I'm currently embroiled in a moderator issue on the Jedi Council Forums, yeah, that one will work. Fucking double standards galore. You can love every single aspect of the Star Wars franchise and get away scott free with telling users who are more critical to fuck off, but the same is not true in reverse.

 

[repeating integers]

The FSTDT forum.

He Who Fights Monsters syndrome has never been more pronounced on the internet. Only the most dedicated lefties on the FSTDT site sign up there, and and I'm fairly certain they've proved the political spectrum is more of a circle.

 

[Fiz_The_Toaster]

I wouldn't know since this is the only place I bothered to be active in.

No other place is cool enough.

Also, battle.net doesn't count for me because I only lurk there for when I'm looking for answers when I'm playing Diablo and I would rather slash my wrists than to be active in there. Just...no.

 

[ReservoirAngel]

Went so some forum I can't even remember the name of now a while back. Some political thing that I didn't know until I'd started posting was moderated by a person whose political views were pretty much the exact opposite of mine. Instead of banning me, he somehow rigged it so whenever I tried to load a page there it instead loaded a screen full of random pictures of naked women and a really homophobic message pop-up.

Rather funny, in retrospect, that he went to that effort just to try and spite me.

 

[shrekfan246]

Yeah, Battle.net and the Bioware Social Network pretty much take the cake for large, relatively active forums.

Even reporting bugs turns into some massive *****-fest somehow. And the rage that burns through battle.net on a day when servers are down and it wasn't scheduled... hoo boy.

As for BSN, outside of the people who are creepily obsessed with their franchises, saying a single positive thing about anything Bioware-related is bound to incite gigantic flame wars that would make this place seem tame in comparison.

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

I actually used to moderate on a couple of (albeit quite small) forums, so I've seen quite a few douchey people. I have no idea if any of them are still active these days.

Anyway, on one particular forum (its name escapes me these days, it was a metal forum, but we covered a lot of stuff besides) we had this one guy who was a total dick, but pretty much just about toed the line for ages, lightly pissing everyone off except for his group of fans who thought the sun shined out of his arse. We did a round of promotions- a couple of our old mods had gone inactive- and he was obviously not a candidate we were considering in any way, shape or form. We kinda figured that even his friends would recognise he was far too rude an immature to be a mod, but when we announced that we'd promoted a couple of other guys, they all flipped their shit and decided to launch some kind of retarded campaign to have him promoted.

Admittedly, most problems on forums aren't too big if you're moderating because you can mete out justice to the offending parties, but it was a pretty awkward situation because they weren't technically breaking any of the rules most of the time. You hear a lot of horror stories about mods just banning people they don't like or disagree with, and we really tried not to do that kind of thing. We could only really deal with the ones that spammed on threads, or our inboxes, so it took a while to go away and created a really horrible atmosphere.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

Lyokofreak is filled with some real fucks. They Mock the disabled user behind their locked forum, but then I just explain to this user why people aren't really fond of her suddenly I'm being called an ableist.

 

[ClockworkPenguin]

I used to be fairly active on the Guardian's comment boards, but after a while I found that after 1 page every thread turned into the same argument (with the same people). I occasionally still go there, and it's all right, it just got kind of boring when that was the main place I visited.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

I've always found Newgrounds really friendly. Having said that, I almost never visit the actual forum, I just post music and review stuff.

I think the main point of the audio portal is for a royalty-free music resource that the other content creators can use. As a result, I don't post *everything* I make there. My commissioned stuff can't be posted there for obvious reasons. Still, it can be a good place to find work to build a showreel with, if nothing else.

I remember the Stickpage forums being needlessly hostile and surprisingly elitist for a forum based around animating fucking stick figures. I am seriously not willing to spend a load of money on Flash just to make stick men hit each other.

It seemed like every other response to anything in that place is the word "******." It's seriously worse than /b/ or /v/.

I haven't been there in years, though. I haven't touched stick figure animation since I was about 15/16.

I also had a pretty bad experience on the Sonic the Comic - Online! forums when I was, like 12. That was really my fault for being very, very stupid and rude, though.

 

[Eleuthera]

Besides this one I've been reasonably active on the DC Comics board (back in 1998-2002) and the SiSSYFiGHT board (2001-2007), I never had any real trouble on either. I only ever got in one real argument with anyone on a forum, though the argument happened a few weeks before I was going to meet the guy IRL (as part of a group) which made me a bit nervous. He turned out a great guy (when not discussing politics).

 

[Longstreet]

Man, ever looked at the PC origin forum that is called Battlefield 3?
It's full with arrogant cunts that will cus you out because you KDR or SPM isn't up where it is "socially acceptable"

Otherwise, i've only had nice forums.