The Competition

My favorite thing about this board is that you actually have to put thought into your responses (and suggestions for threads) or you get ripped to fucking shreds.

Which makes this as close to real life as it gets.

There are a lot of people who use the anonymity of the internet and message boards to act like bad ass motherfuckers. There isn't an awful lot of that around here. I would gladly have every one of you over to my house for a BBQ or something, because you are all A) intelligent and B) genuinely decent people.

Yes, genuinely decent people. Say what you will about having to suggest threads rather than just "lolmygod look at this shizzz!!" all over the place, say what you want about red dots and green dots. This board is quick to tell you you're full of shit. This board is quick to tell you that you're acting like a fuckhead. This board is quick to rake you across the coals.

And this board also donated $1100+ to a charity volleyball tournament because a guy they only know from an internet forum asked them to. This board also donated to another person's charity bike ride.

Basically, you guys are exactly what the people I have as friends in real life are like: Quick to call me on my (*cough* rather limited *cough) bullshit, but also are kind and good.

So, other boards? Pretty much the exact opposite.

Which is why this is the only message board I frequent now (other than forums that are specific to cars I currently own if I need quick troubleshooting advice).

Think about it: Need help with your computer? Go on TiB. Need general help with you car, your Organic Chemistry homework, setting up a wireless, buying a guitar, or banging a hot chick? Go on TiB.

 

In my opinion, the average TiB poster puts significantly more thought into the content and wording of his or her contributions here than the average person does in "real life."

To determine whether that is a tribute to the posters here, or an embarrassment to most other people and methods of communication shall be left as an exercise for the reader.

 

The only other message board that I frequent besides this one is the Jeopardy! message board, at the Sony Pictures website. I hate to admit that, but I like this thread topic.

When I first joined that message board in 2004 it was a really great place. The group of people who posted on it was fairly small, and many of them had been contestants on the show. But about three years ago it really started to go downhill. As the numbers of board members increased, the quality of the content that was posted went way down. A lot of the well-liked people left and haven't been back. The absolute worst was all the trolls who came out to post about the Watson matches. I still read it because there will sometimes be a thread that is interesting, but it has been sad to see what was once a good message board go to hell.

Not all has been lost, however: there is a website that was created by a past contestant on the show where we play Jeopardy games online. We can use boards that have been used on the show as well as ones that we write ourselves. We have also used our boards to run tournaments. We nicknamed the website "Fight Club," since we tell very few people about it. Sometimes on the Sony board we will make allusions to it, and it's most fun when somebody starts a thread asking if there is a place where you can play Jeopardy games online. And I just violated the first rule of Fight Club by posting this, but since this is a good message board I don't care.

Also, the Sony Pictures website got hacked last week, so the message board probably won't be back for awhile

 

I had two message board experiences: one was my friend Nick's board (bad; had a few people from my old IRC days that I didn't get along with - I am still a member there but haven't logged in in 5+ years and have a different e-mail so I couldn't recover my password, even if I wanted to; also, it was a small board and had some horrible groupthink), and my other, better experience was with the TMMB and then RMMB - I joined shortly after the TMMB went up a second time? Or was it the third? Anyway, that board had a lot of funny*, so I find myself here, which has the best users (aside from mr. satanism - I remember he was pretty funny on the RMMB. And Eddie Clayton, too - a pity he didn't find his way here).

*I have other things to say about this, but that was covered in 2009...

 

One messageboard I visit is, I think, the third or so iteration of an offshoot messageboard that was created from the RPGamer. Much like here, I only really lurk there and post infrequently. There's only about ten or so active members so it's a more or less tight knit group still. Mostly just bullshitting about nerd-centric activities like video games, obscure movies, anime, comic books etc.

I visit, but have never posted (and probably never will) on IMDB's messageboards. Occasionally an interesting thread will pop up, but it's quite rare and I wind up with less of a soul and less intelligence as a result of reading some of those posts.

I like this site, and its predecessor, because I love anything that can effectively mix highbrow with the lowbrow. How many other messageboards have, on the first page, proper, intelligent discussions about intricate internet goings on in one thread and a somewhat empirical and scientific thread about female ejaculation.

I mean, proper female ejaculate apparently isn't viscous. Who knew?!

 

I visit a few messageboards. This is the main one because as everyone already mentioned, it is the epitome of discourse. A few others I visit are AR15.com, survivalistboards, itstactical, shtf411, some cooking ones, and the forums on What.cd. The forums everywhere else are pretty decent, however the boards on What.cd are very heavily moderated, sometimes to the point of being PC which I really hate.

Everything else is absolute utter drivel.

 

I've never been a member of a forum whose members truely care about the difference between "your" and "you're."

 

Sorry folks. I'm running Windows XP, and I think Explorer 8, so I don't have the capability to spell check on the fly. When I come to a hard word to spell, I'll type it into the Google search bar and copy and paste the word.

I thought I had the word "truly" though.

 

What makes me wince is when I see someone write an e-mail WITH spellchecker... and then ignore all the red lines that carpet the page. I feel like grabbing the dude by the collar and saying "So you take THAT little pride in your thoughts that you're willing to present them like that? If you were to say that to your boss instead of writing that e-mail, you would be mistaken for a retard. Is that the impression you want to make?"

 

If I recall correctly, there was a thread here about some form of stupid people somewhere. You had a long post about how these dumb people piss you off and you peppered it with every single abortion of your, you're, there, their, they're and possibly some others. You got all pissy when you got called out then NettGod banned you. Briefly.

That's what I like about this place. Unlike the RMMB, unless you consistently fuck up and defy proper grammar, you'll get some slack. Its not a Grammar Nazi regime, but a common courtesy to others to spell things correctly. Or at least try.

Focus I lurk at Freak Safari and In Strength. I have nothing to add there, or here for that matter, but I like to read what they have to say. I occasionally check out the Ten Club (Pearl Jam's messageboard) but people there either praise the shit out of the band or bitch and moan. All with faggy emoticons.

 

I occasionally will post in some of the fetlife.com threads that take my interest. Let me say that the no politics and no religion rules here are very, very sensible. There's nothing like watching what would be a decent thread topic devolve into leftist/rightist propaganda and opposition politics slandering - especially when it's amongst a bunch of dominants who are used to people doing what they tell them to.

 

I spend my life on Reddit. I used to think that it was like this place, where I could engage someone in an argument and it would be more or less rational to the finish. I was quickly disabused of that notion (men's rights activists are a particular form of rabid) and now I just stick to the occasional random comment.

I tried to participate in their female subreddit too, but it was hard to tell who was being a cunt for cunt's sake, and who was a man masquerading as a cunt to piss everyone off. That got old quickly as well.

 

The only other site I lurk on is Bluelight.ru . It's a drug forum focused on harm minimization. If you've ever had a question about the precise effects of a substance, or the most efficient route of administration, or what's around in your area, or whether that new batch of <x> is dangerous, Bluelight is the place to go. The place was invaluable to me in my younger years.

Of course, the flipside is that you have a messageboard where your most prominent posters are tripped out, tweaking, stoned, or otherwise fucked up. It's an interesting dynamic.

 

As do I. I was active there once, but things didn't work out between us. Way too clique-y for me. Now its mostly a circle jerk among about 6 members, and not worth posting on. Kind of sad, because some of those folks are very funny.

I posted for a short while at politicalforum, but never really got into it.

 

Casual Hoya - Georgetown Hoops blog with generally witty commenteriat. Way better than others I've found. I stick around because of the general level of posting, as well as the lack of rabid hyperbole that comes with HoyaTalk et al.

MrBlunt.com - hip-hop forum with a small tight-knit community and relatively intelligent level of discussion. Not quite so strict as this place about emoticons, grammar, things like that. Drama bombs do pop up now and then, but we generally know enough about one another that they serve more as "character development" than anything.

Failheap Challenge - a forum for the crappy internet spaceships game EVE Online. Mostly Euro membership with tons of "bittervets" who love to bitch about the game. Heavy trolling. I enjoy it. You won't find more knowledgeable people about EVE. They also do things like invade the Chinese server, wading through translation hacks to troll the Chinamen into registering and defending themselves in broken English. Good times.
+ other EVE forums as well (corp forum, official CCP forums).

 

Freak Safari started off alright, but it quickly dissolved into the same kind of anti-rmmb/bash Tucker message board that the other offshoots did. Funny part was, the mods were so lazy and uncreative they just stole the daily thread ideas from Rmmb. It was like copy/paste, every day.

I don't think I've seen a thread over there get more than 5 responses in the last 5 months.

 

Alright, alright, woah there. This is not the only good messageboard on the internet, let's try not to congratulate ourselves on making people spell correctly too much.

It is, though, one of the few good boards that doesn't have a very specific focus. Most of the boards out there, and the ones mentioned here, are about downhill mountain biking or chili peppers or...fountain pens? (I'm completely flabbergasted at the number of posting members on that site, some 50,000 members with 1000-2000 on at a time. Nuts.)

I post on a few boards, I've been on the once-gigantic Megatokyo forums since I was in 8th grade, back when webcomics were all the rage, but that's almost completely dead. For all the absolute idiots that came on their the regulars did a pretty good job at keeping things consistently not retarded.

What I have been posting on recently is Partial Objects. If you're at all a fan of the Last Psychiatrist you'll like this place, it's basically the content of his blog posts but anybody can post on it, and there is a lot of actual intelligent discussion. What's weird is that the comments on his blog are absolute stupidfuck, but the posters on Partial Objects are well-spoken thinkers for the most part.

 

Up until recently (as in yesterday) I've never been able to find another good forum to post on regularly. When I was younger I posted on the message boards at gamefaqs.com which was huge. They had an individual board for every game out there, all game hardware, and tons of different general topics and pop culture. Of course the bad part was that any message board focused on video games is by definition a cesspool of retardation and emoticons.

Just yesterday I managed to find a message board that is centered around the band Phish (no surprise there), but they only have one board dedicated to that band while having a good deal of other boards dedicated to more general topics. While it's not as great as this place, there are still the occasional emoticons and big signatures, it seems to have an acceptable level of maturity.

Of course nothing can beat this place though. Drunk threads every week, Member breast/booty threads, and currently our most popular thread topic is female orgasms and squirting. Can't top that.