I asked a question on the recent TiBette thread on why they choose to use a forum so heavily populated with shaft, and it's pretty much been the same answer thus far: this is the only message board (excluding the defunct RMMB) that is not "LOL or emoticon heavy" and seemingly the only board with funny and smart people posting on it. Boy, ain't THAT the truth. When the RMMB shut down, not knowing this place was up and running for ten long days I searched for a new message board to find funny people that I could exchange horror stories with, and strike three. Strike THIRTY, actually. I found a site that links you to the thirty most popular message boards on the web, and one by one tried them out, finding out they had one thing in common: they ALL stunk like undouched vag. Annoying cutesy gifs, emoticons that look like psychedelic glyphs, and endless web abbreviations from people too lazy to type entire words. Let's not forget the endless "only my opinions matter because I'm the only open-minded human being on earth" flame wars that errupt every five goddamn seconds. I tried to start up a "LOLfats" board on one site and was crucified by these unfunny prudes for it. Fuck off. I'm not too experienced with message boards. Before TiB, the only ones I frequented are RMMB and the hilarious (and terminated) The Phat Phree because they were the only ones that were not only great, but just plain tolerable. Focus: How are your experiences with other message boards? What the ones to try and the ones to avoid in your opinion?
The only other place I post is instrength which most of you know was part of the old board. I've never even bothered trying to read or post on boards if something like TTT or +1 was considered a relevant post, I may have a lot of free time on my hands, but not THAT much free time. A few years ago I started a message board for just my group of friends since a lot of us couldn't access personal e-mail at work and we wanted to shoot the shit during the day and plan our weekend get togethers. It was great for about three months until it all of a sudden died and for no real reason. Luckily all of us have e-mail access at work now, but I really miss using the message board format and keeping it separate from e-mail.
I run a pretty large biking forum - primarily mountain biking/downhill focused. If any of you jackals are interested, it's no big secret since my username is the same over there: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.ridemonkey.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.ridemonkey.com</a> We try to keep it a little classier than some of the other mountain bike forums. The posting rate is a LOT higher than this site, so it's virtually impossible to keep up with, but the community regulates itself reasonably well, with the text-speak kiddies being ridiculed out of posting very frequently. Of course, being a genre-specific community, we also try to be a little more inclusive than places like this or RMMB, which has upsides and downsides. You don't get the higher education/literacy rate of a site like this. It does tend to be a friendlier site for newbies, though, and there are a larger number of participants in any given forum or thread. I participate occasionally in a couple other forums but not very often. I think people saying, "this is the only board that..." just haven't spent much time looking for other boards. There are a huge number of message boards out there, and to believe this is the only one that doesn't actively drive out the idiots is silly.
The only other message boards I frequent are gamer message boards and I leave them within 10 minutes of surfing because the general intelligence level makes me want to shoot myself. L0l no0b f@g. L2play cuz im b3tta than u. This place is a godsend/timewaster.
The only other thing on the internet that I've found comes close to the RMMB/TiB are some of the subreddits on Reddit.com. Yeah, they are just as prone to flamewars and lolspeak as the next forum - but just like with 'rep' here, the 'karma' helps me and everybody else figure out who has something relevant to say.
Some of the sub-forums at somethingawful.com are pretty good, specifically the automotive and gun-related sections. I mostly stay out of the general forums. There's active moderation and you have to pay $10 to register so there's a slight barrier to entry which seems to help keep some of the trolls out. You also have to pay again if you get banned which gives the ban-hammer a little more weight.
I go to Freak Safari form time to time. But there are only five active members there now. So I can catch up on anything funny that happened by visiting once a month.
The only other boards I go to are strength and conditioning forums (instrength, ironmind), a rugby forum, and a half dozen fishing forums. This is the only place I go for random perverted rambling.
I used to be a member of the local Porsche Club, but have left recently. I'd spun up a bunch of online stuff for them, including a forum. The recent batch of executives over there decided to redo their web sites and totally change their posting policies so that only club members could post, so most of the Porsche guys that I know that posted on there couldn't any more, including myself. Even though I manage the only Porsche Factory sponsored Porsche race team in the region, they wouldn't let us interact on the forums without paying stupid money to become a site sponsor. We laughed. I then took the club's old forum that I'd developed/run/setup/hosted for the past 4 years, and spun it back up with a slight rebranding. It's not busy, by any stretch, but even club members come and post on my boards now rather than use the piece of shit they've got now. It's just a fun way for a bunch of local car guys, Porsche or otherwise, to chat about shit, and organize/plan for tours, autocrosses, track days, etc. No BS politics, and just a focus on fun.
I lurk at few other boards, mostly just having to do with hobbies Im interested in. Mainly thehotpepper.com which is for growing chili peppers and ar15.com which is a huge gun forum dedicated mainly to the black rifle but many other guns as well. I used to lurk on a Bengals football message board hoping to get better links to good Bengals news but the posters were all terrible. Ive never seen such irrational group think, mind boggling assumptions, and flat out numbskullery in one place. I just thank god we have decent policing for unwarranted idiocy and that we don't have huge unsightly signatures with poorly photoshopped pictures and banner adds in them. I fucking hate looking at all that shit after every single post. Message boards can be very informative, when ever I needed to find anything in Shanghai I'd go to shanghaiexpat.com and search their huge community and would usually find dozens of post for any question I had.
The early days of Sherdog was the worst I've ever seen. Ever. Back when MMA forums were just kind of starting up, it seemed that all the retards were flocking over there and it was impossible to get any good discussion in about anything. Haven't been there in a while, so I have no idea if it's gotten any better. Don't want to risk being exposed again, though, so I'll never know.
I post occasionally on twoplustwo, which is the huge poker forum. It's very net-speaky, especially in the News Views and Gossip section, but it has really good info on stuff, and if you go to the actual poker threads, really good advice. Lucky the subforums I post the most on (SSPLO), are pretty small and unimportant, so nobody feels the need to be a dick or anything. I also post occasionally on rapmusic.com. It's alright, if you like rap music. There's a few really good posters, and a lot of rappers post there, so if that's your thing, it's cool.
The only reason I ever got on the internet to begin with was for automotive messageboards. Prior to that, I thought that the internet was the domain of losers, geeks, and gamers. I was half right. The best automotive boards are as follows: 460ford.com (big-block Ford forum, the best there is without a doubt.) thirdgen.org (third generation GM F-Body forum) F150online.com ('97-up Ford F-series forum) tccoa.com (Thunderbird/Cougar club of America) torinocobra.com (Ford Torino/Mercury Cyclone forum) I sometimes go on the Mr. Satanism forum (remember him from the RMMB?); you can access it from his website, mrsatanism.com. I gotta be honest though, it's usually pretty dead. But that's just because he needs more members, so join!
Message boards are really, really painful. I cringe anytime I am trying to gather information or need to find an answer to a question, and the first several results that pop up are from message boards. It's like being at an outlet mall -- between the asians, teenagers, and stay-at-home moms, it's almost impossible to find what you're looking for in 10 minutes or less. That said, I've always been fond of this place, and it's the only messageboard that I like to visit. It's pretty well organized and moderated. The topics and sub-topics are easy to navigate, and you don't find a bunch of 1-post threads that lead to nowhere. Also, some of our members share pictures of their boobs and butts, which really makes this place seem much more personal.
I'm a part of a couple car forums: Myg37.com and ourvq.com MyG is a huge place devoted to a large myriad of people who own G37's and other Infiniti's. As one can expect, there are a few people on there who are intelligent and incredibly helpful, but there are also those who are complete fucking retards. Ourvq is a spinoff and a much more mature forum dedicated to 350/370 Z's and all kinds of Infiniti's. It's rather new, but the community is 10x better than MyG. There's not much help there as far as working on the car, but there are still a ton of great vendors advertising their wares. I come here because I like a lot of you guys and it's a nice break from reality and not having to deal with my own issues. So keep up the good work, Idiots, and I might let you stick around.
As a teen I used to frequent the forums on totse.com specifically the better living through chemisty forum as in those horrible pre google and wikipedia days, was a semi reliable place to get information on various drugs and meet a plethora of fucked up individuals. I mainly lurked and posted sporadically on the rmmb and here because quite simply, this is the only forum I've found which promotes decent, informative or funny posters and destroys those who are unable to post any of the three. This place encourages lurking, in the sense that if you have nothing to say, don't post unless you love the feel of a ban hammer or derision from the entire community. I keep coming back here because you are some hilarious, depraved and intelligent motherfuckers and is a nice reminder that the internet is not completely full of actual idiots.
I do find it interesting that this is one of the few messageboards where words matter. Unless I've been drinking, I take a while to make a post. I choose my words carefully, proofread several times, and ask myself several times, "Will this actually benefit the discussion?" Four out of five times, I wuss out and hit the Back button because what I have to say really isn't as witty or awesome as I think it is. On other boards, people post whatever they can think of. And when they get called out, they go "lol it's the internet i don't care. Why should you?" I don't know if being here has spoiled me, but I can't stand that. Sure, that mindset is okay on 4chan, but in a real discussion, one where men and women talk about stuff that actually has relevance in real life? Really? Watching a discussion turn into "+1 lol haha" doesn't make me angry, but it does make me sad that yet another discussion had potential and lost it thanks to people who can't control the crap that comes out of their mouths. The only other forum that I post on is Fountain Pen Network. What's funny is that I don't have the fountain pen mania like some of the other people there; I'm there because all the aforementioned idiots aren't (although I do own several FPs. Most of them were gifts) The average poster there is 45-50 years old, still considers the Internet to be a faster version of the Post Office, and acts accordingly. It's definitely a very different kind of humor there, and I go back and forth depending on my mood. I showed a friend at work that forum, and the first thing he said was "Why are there 400 people online? 400 people discussing PENS? What the fuck..."
There's a few automotive, Jeep, and off-road vehicle forums I regularly visit. There's a local fishing and outdoors forum I'm on. I have had accounts at some forums upwards of 8-9 years and sometimes it's cool to check back with them after a long time. I do wish I could find a good MMA forum, they all seem to be full of little kids or people who blindly worship mediocre fighters.
The only other two messageboards that I check out are BBQ related, they are moderated well and the absence of LOL speak and related bullshit is refreshing. I post more over on those boards than I do here, but this site is the only one that I have checked out that makes me laugh out loud. If anyone is interested <a class="postlink" href="http://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/index.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/index.php</a> <a class="postlink" href="http://tvwbb.com/eve" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://tvwbb.com/eve</a>