Storytime with Fletcher, gather round. I'm going to tell you all about boards I've been on which went to shit.
So a fun fact: I was once a goddamn retard. I've been on the internet for over a decade now. At one point in there, I was pretty young. Despite being intelligent for my age, I was so very socially retarded. Especially online. And the first big thing that got me onto the internet?
Webcomics.
Anyway. The first board I went to was the relatively-new forum of a webcomic called
Adventurers! (which just ended last Monday, and was somewhat decent, it's
here if curious). Now, it was old enough to have developed a core community at this point. Looking back, I see it was kind of dickish, in fact, given that there was more than a little correlation between postcount and respect.
I took the top ranking for posts on the board within a year. Among other idiocies I committed were the infamous "That other account on my IP isn't me, it's my sibling" dumbassery, massive spamming (duh), and being a total spaz with no respect for the people who were much better behaved than me. Luckily, in the end, I learned from my mistakes, and I became halfway decent (although by no means a good poster, just an "acceptable" one) after a time. Unfortunately, I'd driven away a lot of regulars at this point. Oops.
(There's a nice postscript to that story: shortly after that, a few good things happened at once. Webrunner, the guy running the forum/who made the comic, made a little internet game which brought in some attention, a crop of newbies who I helped train sprung up, and then he moved servers to a new board, so that all the horrors were erased and a new set of good people were there to fill it already. I left soon after, because in a twisted sense, my work was done there.)
A brief interlude before I discuss the second major board I was on that disintegrated: there was another comic known as the Bad Boys of Computer Science. I found it in its dying breaths, but it had a forum. It was the single most elitist setup EVER. I made maybe one post a week, not trying to be insulting, or even to draw attention to myself, just to slowly work my way in, sort of like how I made my way into FB. Except unlike you guys, these dickwads decided to play "let's fuck the newbie up". I got spammed, harrassed whenever I posted, and frankly, I LAUGHED when the boards crashed horrifically right before the artist of the comic disappeared for a good year (without fixing them, might I add).
Anyway. Big board disaster #2. Now, as I said, I was improving, but not altogether a model poster at this point. I continued finding webcomics, though, and the one I would find myself reading more and more would be something called
College Roomies From Hell!!! (as before, look
here if you will), which was unique to me at the time because it was silly... but had plot from time to time, holy shit! I read the comic for about a year before I noticed the forum link beneath the comic after a site redesign. I gave it a shot and ended up there, and joined after a brief lurk. At first, the sheer PACE shocked the shit out of me. In the time it would take me to make one post, about 5 other topics would shoot to the top of the page, and another would be created about once or twice a day.
I got used to the pace. This was good. Unfortunately, this board also introduced me to new realms of things I'd mostly avoided on the Adventurers! forums: forum roleplay, and fanfiction/fanart. (A side note: That board's fanartists were some goddamn awesome people, and there were two fanfic writers who I swear to god could have wrote novels... and one actually turned a fic he wrote there into a short story, which I seem to recall was published later.) I also learned, since this board was larger than the previous ones, about trolls. And strangely enough, two of the first people I befriended there were a troll and a guy who I'm still friends with today, who said troll introduced me to.
I became well-known there for what was supposedly semi-decent writing (yes, I wrote fanfiction. So sue me.), until I did something that cemented me as "infamous". I got drunk, and, while chatting with a few other regulars on IRC, proceeded to create
a horror. (I would not click that were I you, mostly because it's just crappy... and also, a little embarassing. Sad thing, though, is that it's still memorable enough there people scare newbies with the link. No joke.) I was teased, but I was also accepted, because I had finally realized that a lot of these people were nuts, in the fun way.
Then a group sprung out of some of the board's roleplay. This faction (retardedly enough calling itself FLEET because OH SHIT WE PLAY WITH MAKE BELIEVE TEXT SPACESHIPS... here, have a link to
their silly forums that a member gave me when he tried to "recruit" me) would stir up shit, become elitist, and drive away a good deal of my friends, and the oldbies who didn't join in on the madness. They were dicks, and they chased off a lot of good people. More than one was also
unmistakably fucked-up. Let me just list some fun stories involving them:
* I can no longer feel anything in my right foot because one of them smashed the shit out of it at a meetup of a few of us at a convention once. The nerves are completely dead because he decided that "adult in steel-toed boots VS. young teenager in sandals" was a fair fight.
* A young woman who I remain friends with to this day can actually no longer go into the IRC channel that some of us maintained due to the terms of a restraining order between her and a douche (and he WAS a douche, it's not my place to say what happened, but it was
vile) who became a channel op.
* I had one of these guys ask me the following, no lie: "In the event that I murder someone, if I pass through your town, would you mind feeding me for a day or two while I lay low?" (The context of said conversation WAS serious.)
* One pervy bastard kept hitting on my sister while he was in town for the yearly comic convention (she had to meet up with me to use our shared cell-phone). She was 13. He was 30+.
* Oh, remember that story about my crazy ex? I met her via this group. (She was also friends with the fucked-up channel op. Very close friends. As in, she believed his word about what happened over that of my buddy, DESPITE A COURT GIVING HER THE RESTRAINING ORDER AND SIDING WITH HER AFTER THE INCIDENT BETWEEN THEM.)
So yes. This place went to hell. And then to make it worse, right after the oldbie exodus, we had an influx of newbies. And not good ones. No. One-step-above-Gaia newbies. And unfortunately, during this, the comic's artist/forum's lone moderator was taking a maternity leave to raise her newly-born child. It ended badly, and I decided, after realizing that I knew almost nobody there anymore, and that I was posting about once a week, the quality was so low, that it was time to leave. I stopped in from time to time to mess around with the place, but mostly avoided it.
(Post-ramble note again: I actually have returned, slightly, as have a few other people from my generation of the forums. Apologies to Madroll, as I've stolen your bad poster retrospective idea, and the people of said board are currently voting on candidates. I talk to a lot more of the people from this board off of it, though, as quite a few just can't stand going back after all the bullshit.)
Man, I don't know HOW it is that FB manages to inspire long-ass posts in me, given that I usually go for brevity. I'm just going to hope this is sort of on the topic, and that someone will laugh at this, and then point out it's 4:39 AM here, so I'm sleep-deprived. Sorry 'bout that. Night, all.
