IS IT JUST ME?

I recal a particur member of Abuzz, in its peak days, was some dude who would always open his posts with
"Being from Andorra"....

If you really expect to see things get better, than you'll have to stop responding to Spurious, Gunga Dim, David, Finn--a great many people who come here just to stir the turd. Then there are othes like Spade who absolutely cannot tolerate being criticized, contradicted or questioned. Some of them, Finn and Spurious especially, only come here hoping to get a rise out of people. Others, like David, are truly clueless, and unfunny. People like Gunga Dim and Spade just cannot handle being criticized or contradicted.

Those things will never change. You can ignore those folks, of course, but if you engage them, you're not going to get civil discourse, nor style nor profound and intelligent content. Maybe that's why others have lefft. Me, i just got nastier as people got nasty with me. These days, there's a few creeps like Spurious, Sturgis or JTT whom i ignore--i do try not to feed the trolls. But i'd say the core members have changed, in some cases for the worse, and there's nothing you can do about it.

We have trolls, troll-trollers, wits (some of whom only imagine themselves as such), the humorless, those who like to debate and those who don't, those who insist on the last word (particularly frustrating when a number of last-worders insist on duking it out for the last word), those who come for a minute and stay for a few years, and those who have been here for a few years and decide to step back.

We each have our own favorites and list of folks we ignore (and wish others would too). My own bane are the troll-trollers and last-worders, but such is life.

I’ve popped in and out of here since 2006 and I really haven’t noticed the forum being anymore vicious then it was back when I first registered.

I like the fact that there is less moderation here, I was a member of another forum that had half a dozen moderators and you had to play nice every time you posted or you’d be banned. I stopped posting there three years ago.

I’ve run into quite a few in town that lurk here but don’t post very often. I think some of the queens are lying in wait getting ready to pounce on this place once Thom Swift goes to trail. Talk about Vicious bitches!

I don't enjoy mean posters. Most trolls don't bother me because I bore them.

Boring BBB

As an aside, the election silly season has brought back some people I've missed a lot, like FreeDuck, snood, and Lash. Monterey Jack seems more active too. (I'm sure I'm forgetting others.)

Banning was an effective tool, but only when E-mail addresses were difficult to obtain. With easily-obtainable accounts such as Hotmail, gmail, etc. banning lost its sting, since the banned person could just sign up again under a new account (witness Massagato under all his various aliases).

Since banning is no longer an effective tool, it makes no sense to continue using it. It's kinda like complaining that you can't buy buggy whips anymore.

Personally, I find the introduction of the ignore feature to be much more useful than banning, as I can customize it myself.

he means xxspademasterxx, you racist ****

Then the humor would be gone entirely dont you think??

What wporks for you does not work for me. I cant stay pissed oof for more than a few moments, and I have to get re-toked in order to keep up the vehemence. So far the only person whose ever gotten me stoked for a day or more was an Australian member who disappeared for a while and is now back with a surprisingly more mellow demeanor.

I cant hold grudges like you apparently can anymore. When I see you engage someone , like youve been doing recently with SPade, I just slip away cause its probably gonna be a long term engagement with no clear winner.

Thomas is about the only one here who will reconsider his own positions and take advice from others.Course Thomas aint purposely funny, hes into stuff like "information" and "analyses of information". He does say funny things but theres always a lesson behind it.

YOU KNOW, I failed to say that, of the people with reay great S' O-H (sense of humer), CHAI and WALLY TEA sound like fun folks.



I didnt say that I wasnt part of the problem.

I was a member of another forum that had a rating system, it was a star system, and the thread got a one to five star rating. That was the number one complaint on that forum because of the bitter childish poster that would purposely give someone they didn’t care for a one star rating.

It was a very popular forum but the mods refused to remove the rating system and the forum quickly died off.

huh?
never saw the xxxxx name

we have that same thing here with the thumb thing. I never could figger out who thought that up since they probably didnt get out much. You give anybody a rating scale to submit and there will be a certain number who automatically use it for crime and/or evil.

I have to admit that I used to write stupid tags on a guy who called hisself "Jack of all trades"( Its easy to imagine what Id call him in tags)

See, now you're playing the asshole again. I'm not holding a grudge, i'm just unwilling to beat my head against a stone wall. I'm not willing to give the hateful shits a shot at me. They can fulminate against anything they like, or me in particular, and i don't read it.

This kind of bullshit is your stock-in-trade, like the posts when you attempt to suggest i'm angry just because i won't swallow your bullshit. It's not about any grudge, it's about walking away.

For which I apologized profusely because what you read (and took offense to) was not at all what I meant.

Well, i don't see an apology there, but it's no big deal, 'cause i know you will often try to pull that trick. I still occasionally respond to the bullshit that Finn posts, because he presents himself plausibly, but it's still bullshit. He still relies on a battalion of straw men, commanded by his right-wing stereotype of the vile liberal. I still respond to Gunga Dim because his bullshit is so often hilarious, and, to be honest, because it's so easy to make him look like a fool, and to show him for the right-wing religious fanatic, racist and propagandist that he is. I've pretty well stopped reading Omsig's BS--it's not worth the time. But reading Finn or the snake is an awfully palid kind of humorous exercise.

I, for one, appreciate your starting this thread because it exposes some of the unspoken behaviors and/or motivations behind the behaviors. IMHO, some of this less admirable behavior is vexing and perplexing to me. I feel it may be shrinking a once-vital forum. Then again, it could just be exhibiting the natural ebb and flow of a typical online forum.

See...now where this thread has gone ... (ad hominem) is where I walk off and read a book. Of course, doing that is a worthwhile activity (and one that I need to do more of). FWIW, when I come here, either I seek info, or interesting debate, or humor ...and entertainment from discourse. However, if I want bickering or chest-thumping (my own negative behavior included), I'd either have stayed married or visit my dear relatives. The dynamics here at times can be like a prolonged Thanksgiving Day reunion that may have gone on far too long.

The health and vitality of any online forum rests on the backs of regulars and how they interact. So if people want a forum to be entertaining and of some value, they need to stop poisoning it one dropper-full at a time.

I like the Thankgiving dinner analogy because its a time when relatives, thrown together for a weekend, will try to reassert their pecking order positions and many long term grudges begin with these encounters.
Same here.
I wish we could stay in the realms of exchanging information and opinions as adults. Where we are wrong, Id hope to have the maturity to say, "Yep Im wrong, thanks" .
It doesnt work that way and humor is one of the first things to go off the table.

Could part of the problem be that we don't yet have the Groups function where we can occasionally go off to our own little niche groups for the discussions (lighthearted or deadly serious) we crave?

It was my impression that the Groups function would offer refuge from the usual annoyances found in the less-moderated general forum community.

You betcha . . . FM had no business making that snarky remark about holding a grudge.