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

[bug_of_war]

I've only joined this forum, but when perusing through any EA forum (be it their own or a company they own) there is a LARGE pile of hate that just makes it annoying to go through. Also, there was this one forum (forget the name of the site) where in which I found a LONG argument where in which one commenter was saying how Call of Duty can't possibly be good in anyway and that his opinion was fact and everyone else was just an idiot. So yeah, quite happy that Escapist seems to have so few of those pretentious assholes, and whilst there are people on here that throw hate at EA, lets just say the wording is more generous than what I've seen.

 

[tippy2k2]

One forum I went to someone specifically made a thread to insult me. That was fun.

Other than that... not much. There has been the few times I went to /v/ to see what all the fuss was about, and surprise surprise it's a really shitty place.

That is exactly why I have always loved and treasured this place. Let me explain...

So back in my younger days (a year or so ago), someone I evidently REALLY pissed off made a Tippy2K2 bashing thread and said a lot of less-than-nice things. On many other forums, this thread would stay up for quite a while. On The Escapist (without myself PMing a Mod), the thread was crushed within a hour.

People ***** about the Mod's on this forum but I absolutely adore this place (probably to a very unhealthy level) and would never dream of cheating on it with another forum.

 

[IamQ]

World of Warcraft forums. I'm Swedish, so I used the european forums. So many Hungarians. So many French. So little correct spelling or grammar.

 

[MXRom]

Gamefaqs is (or at least used to be) totally garbage. You would go to the forums and ask a question and you would get at least 3 meme/in joke/insult responses for every real one. It wasn't like traumatizing or whatever it was just extremely lame.

Pretty much gamefaqs here too. Had an alright time early on. Then the mods started getting weird. Boards for the games I like would be frequented by one very persistent troll flooding the boards with cruddy threads and responding in the most annoying ways possible. Yet the mods did nothing about him.

But when someone,me, told him to go fuck off, suddenly the mods were all over and I got a day long ban.

Screw gamefaqs.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

A lot of forums that rely on viewers to moderate posts with an up-down voting system. YouTube, Imgur, Flickr (sort of? who even uses Flickr anymore though?), and most notoriously Reddit. It's this very interesting experiment that works on paper, and thus in small scale, but absolutely fails on any scale larger than a few thousand people. Worthwhile or insightful comments are praised by a community and are more likely to be seen, thus more likely to set and example. Inversely, worthless or spam comments are trashed on and vanish from sight, thus less likely to give shitposters a reason to post and more likely to give insight.

However, it really doesn't fucking work on a large userbase. Posts that are quicker to read (and usually less insightful) get upvoted a lot more than a post that takes longer to read. Users grow less accustomed to insightful reads and only lunge straight for the less-than-one-hundred-characters posts and usually grow intolerant of anything longer. Thus, ignoring the worthwhile things (or downright shitting on them) while praising the menial sludge that they can read in half a second. That is the exact opposite of what the system intended, and there's no way to fix it except for entirely slashing the readers down (which is incredibly freaking implausible) or increasing moderation - and there is only so much that can be done. What you now have is an out of control junk corner that drools over any meme template and excludes anything that - oh heaven forbid! - takes longer to read than five seconds.

I'm totally not talking primarily about the stagnating memefest of Reddit. Totally. Seriously. (To be honest, some of the smaller subreddits are the happy exclusions with a low enough subscribers to make it work. However, everything else is junk.)

And on a different note, SPUF. I hate SPUF so very much. Any problem centered around Steam is surprisingly already provided in the official corner, and SPUF has no other use but to complain and be horribly interfaced.

 

[AlbertoDeSanta]

The worst was my fault. I recieved a Major infraction on the Giantitp forums for an 'innapropriate topic'. To be honest, I agree. So, it wasn't the worst thing that's happened. Most of my forum experience has been great, especially here.

 

[DSK-]

I don't know. The worst forum by far is probably this place

The old Bioware forums were great, but when they switched to BSN and ME2 came out it slowly devolved into little more than fecal matter.

 

[Echopunk]

I had a less than thrilling experience with a small forum that no longer exists, under its original name/focus at least. Apparently, I had a different view about most things than the rest of the members. I was in a different age range, was further along in school than most of them, and had a different set of life experiences. I got tired of being called a liar for talking about things that actually happened and personally attacked any time I offered an opinion that ran counter to the day's ruling exercise in group-think.

I also had a bad habit of disagreeing with the "golden child" of the site.

 

[kailus13]

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

Also...

10.000 posts, woooo!!!

What is that from and where do I find more of it, good sir? If you don't mind telling me, that is.

OT: I've only been on three other forums that I can recall. Valve and Warframe were fine, but not very usefull.

The old Ecchi Attack forum was horrible, because everybody seemed to be there purely to make one another miserable. That was over a decade ago, though, so I couldn't tell you specifics. It did put me off forums for a good 8 years; until I signed up for the Escapist. So, worst forum experience in general.

It appears to be from The Fantastic Mr Fox.

Spoiler

OT: The only forum I've really been on has been the Escapist, and I haven't been here long so... Oh no wait I've got one. During the years before I joined up, I spent time lurking. There was one thread by a user named EternalNothingness. The thread seemed fine, so I clicked the spoilers only to find that the spoiler was hiding what I can only describe as inflation fetish porn.

 

[Luke_Triton]

I've had bad experiences with every forum I've joined that doesn't know about Zero Punctuation.

 

[Nouw]

Gearbox Software's Aliens: Colonial Marines forum could get quite unpleasant with its Call of Duty bashing. In hindsight, I shouldn't have gone there in the first place.

Congratu-snip

Congratulations on 10,000 posts

 

[MASTACHIEFPWN]

Facepunch
A bunch of pretentious dick-butts as far as the eye can see.

Other than that, the rest are just unduly boring. I like this place because people actually seem to use it.

 

[Risingblade]

The site owner changed my name because he didn't like me. A lot of the mods didn't like me for some reason. To be fair that forum was full of horrible people.

 

[an annoyed writer]

Gamefaqs is (or at least used to be) totally garbage. You would go to the forums and ask a question and you would get at least 3 meme/in joke/insult responses for every real one. It wasn't like traumatizing or whatever it was just extremely lame.

I remember back in '07 it was so bad that it actually the butt of one of DigitalPh33r/Jon Graham's Jokes in his old "Master Chief Sucks at Halo" Trilogy. Holy fuck that was a long-ass time ago.

 

[Mocmocman]

OT: The only forum I've really been on has been the Escapist, and I haven't been here long so... Oh no wait I've got one. During the years before I joined up, I spent time lurking. There was one thread by a user named EternalNothingness. The thread seemed fine, so I clicked the spoilers only to find that the spoiler was hiding what I can only describe as inflation fetish porn.

You mean This one? [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.397310-My-favorite-part-of-todays-MLP-FiM-episode-SPOILERS]
EN's threads are a treasure trove of gifs and I can't wait until season four so I can finally participate in one.

OT: This is my only real forum and I only lurk so I got nothing.

 

[an annoyed writer]

Facepunch
A bunch of pretentious dick-butts as far as the eye can see.

Other than that, the rest are just unduly boring. I like this place because people actually seem to use it.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that. There's a lot of good modelers there sure, but there's a ton of inflated egos there too. I hate how a lot of the time their answer to certain complex questions is "google is your friend". That's just prickish.

 

[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?

Really I am a long time Newgrounds user myself and while it can be vulgar they aren't usually that needlessly rude. Though it is kinda common sense that if you are posting your music on the net that people will have access to it man. The whole point of the Newgrounds Audio portal is for the music to be used to both give the musicians exposure as well as give resources to the artists.

Either way they aren't usually that bad.

I'm sure there are other areas of the site that can be nice. I don't mind the idea of sharing music with people for free, but I somehow completely skipped over the Creative Commons License thing. I may just post clips of my work on there and just link my SoundCloud up with my profile, but I'm not going to be that enthusiastic about using Newgrounds for a while. Thanks for posting!

 

[negimafan587]

A while back I was really into anime, So naturally i joined a site, anime fuel. Well I was a pretty average member and actually became a low level reviewer, and made a decent amount of friends. So being the adhd stricken individual I am I soon left the site for about a year and one day decided to return only to find some messages for some weird username like sexy girl or something. And after trying to open one was banned from the site forever, for no reason, I tried to get an answer as to why and none ever told me.. :C sadfACE

 

[Darks63]

WrestleZone it Had the dreaded rep system where you need to be so far up in rep to be even taken seriously. You had to post friggin essays to not get low content infractions. Oh and the site admin wasa flame and run type poster and some of the mods had obvious instability issues where they were nice one minute and banning in the next without much of an indication of why. After they did a merge of several thread i noticed that my posts and some others posts were straight up deleted without any notification so i took it as them not wanting my opinion round there and i took my leave.

Also the level of Shelton Benjamin fanboys was way too high. I swear alot of those dudes on that board wanted to be his waifu.

 

[lacktheknack]

I'm tempted to talk about the trauma that was the Tali's Sweat thread on BSN, but...

...I really shouldn't have gone to /b/.

I really should not have.

Seriously.

Don't do it.