Nasty Forums

I’ve been a member of forums (I call them message boards – MBs) since around 2004 and I love them.

They are a great way to get fast answers to questions you have regarding any topic known to man/woman, assuming there is a forum for that topic.

In fact I love them so much, I’ve started two forums of my own.

What I don’t like about forums, is the odd one out there is run by a control freak.

There’s no other word for them and here’s why:

1. In all my years, only one forum has EVER required that they approve your membership. In the last few months, I’ve had to add 2 to that list.

   While I understand that owners don’t want to deal with spammers, 90% of all forums do NOT require that memberships be approved.

   I wouldn’t have such a problem about this screening process, if the owners or moderators actually did their job and approved or rejected people who were actual spammers, but a lot of them don’t. Either they don’t do anything, or they reject innocent people like myself, OR, they accuse you of being a spammer without even asking sensible questions.

   They don’t even respond back to my e-mails or e-mail messages through their contact form.

2. Banning people. I’m all for banning people who have done something serious or haven’t followed the most important rules, but to ban someone who hasn’t done anything wrong, or they are unaware that they did anything wrong, or to listen to one person’s side of the story and NOT the other, that’s just plain controlling. It’s like an insecure child who throws down the gauntlet and says “off with their head”. They don’t mediate to find out what the problem is, they just ban for no reason.

Message boards used to be a fun place to go, but in the last 2 years, I’ve noticed a steep decline in me feeling comfortable being on a forum.

On some forums, you can get a group of close minded, negative, bad mouthing immature children, who can run one or several people off the forum with their mean spirited words.

On most forums people don’t even sign their name at the bottom of their post (I do) which to me means they aren’t very friendly.

I’ve heard these complaints from other people too, and how they stopped going to the XYZ forum because of how mean the people on the board were.

So, before you join a forum, I think you should find out what type of community the forum has to offer. What types of people hang out there.

Are they mature, or do they have nothing better to do with their lives then sit around, judge, criticise etc., because they are unhappy with life.

Is the forum going to be useful to you in getting quality information, or does anyone with an opinion post with no actual skill or knowledge about the subject at hand, and lastly, are the owners or moderators going to ignore your requests to talk to them, or ban you for no reason other than they can?

You shouldn’t have to watch every move you make for fear of pissing off either a moderator, or the person who has no life and sits on the forum all day waiting to respond to every post. Not unless you yourself are mean spirited should you feel like you are in a communist environment.

So I will start making a list, & if you wish to add to that list with your specific comments about what happened, please feel free.

Thank you

Michelle