The horror of IMDB message boards or: How I stopped worrying and learned to love the banhammer

[bartholen_v1legacy]

no standards for grammar, structure

So they don't speak in the Queen's perfect English? Oh no, call the language police! There are plenty of languages other than English and something is always lost in translation, I see poorly written reviews as a kind of a non-point when it could be written by someone who isn't fluent.
OT: This is making me want to go to the boards now!

It's one thing to not have perfect grammar, nobody's perfect. But it's quite another to leave out the very basics like punctuation or starting sentences with big letters. If the text isn't perfectly written but properly structured so I can understand the point, that's perfectly fine. But when there's an entire page's worth of text with no punctuation, chaptering or discernible sentences, then you shouldn't be writing it.

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

They are what keeps this site from becoming a wasteland of [...] smugness

I find this statement to be amusing and humorous.

OT:
I think the most fun I've had on the IMDB forums was on the page for Attack The Block. It's just page after page of people writing goddamn dissertations on why black people are horrible and thugs can't be protagonists.

In terms of the moderation here, damn good for the most part. The low-content warning can be a bit pointless as they're easy to get around, but even those serve an important purpose. I've also always felt the "Mod Sass" rule was a bit shady, but then again it virtually never comes up. Probably because all the mods are major users as well, so they understand the culture better than most.

As I've always said, the beauty of the internet is the variety of locations and cultures. I go to some sites to spew nonesense and be unbelievably racist, I go to The Escapist to be fairly polite and civilized and I go to other sites for [s/]filthy, horrible porn[/s] something in between. If every site was just one thing, the net would be boring.

Zoop

I'm afraid the Escapist itself is not innocent either, given some of the things I perused on the Escspist.TXT thing or have - you know - actually seen around here. Nevertheless, there are some better things, so I'm not saying it's as bad. Even still, it's not 'my haven'. The Escapist is a good place to amuse oneself for a while. I got other places listed as 'haven'.

I now desperately want to know what FalloutJack feels is a haven.

 

[necromanzer52]

Everything you say about the IMDB forums is true. That said, a long time ago, I discovered a forum on some forgotten page, with a small population of extremely cool people. This was at a point in my life when my daily schedule consisted of: Get up, go to school, come home, go on the internet, go to bed, repeat. And so for a period of about a year these people were literally my only friends.

They helped me through some tough times, and gradually I grew more confident, and made some real life friends, but continued to frequent this board due to my love for these people I had never met. Sadly, over the years they stopped visiting the board one-by-one, and it's now a shadow of what it once was. Dead, but never forgotten.

So say what you want about IMDB. You'll be right, but I could never hate those forums because of how much this one little page means to me.

 

[haruvister]

Often it depends on when you visit a film's message board. Basically, visit any time around a major's film's release and it will be full of gushing propaganda, both positive and negative. Re-visit in a few months' time and one may find some interesting discussion.

 

[Liv's Runaway Snail]

I'll have to agree with you there when it comes to the IMBD forums...Although I admit they're entertaining, I tend to peruse them every so often. And I think the actual personal (actors/directors) boards are pretty bad, especially the female ones. Sam Taylor-Johnson for example.

 

[FalloutJack]

I now desperately want to know what FalloutJack feels is a haven.

Well, I use to have my own place, a forum dedicated to some kick-ass writing and roleplaying in my own unique universe which also allowed for influence/interference from other realms (Read as "Existing Media"), but after a rather nasty power struggle with my co-admin, I had to shut her down. All the good times remain firmly in mind, huge creative moments of fun, but the site itself is gone and I don't want to run another.

So, I currently stay at another different big forum community for the writing and roleplaying as one of their most-veteran members. My place was a largely evil-rampant place called the Dark Dominion. This one is more off-the-wall and dynamic in that it's the random world of 'If anime was real life', Anime High School. The community's been around for at least ten years with people popping in, staying around, going off, coming back, and so on. It's allowed me to satisfy my need for plotting, scheming, and creating.

Yeah, it's no hub for your news like the Escapist or something. It's a place to go have FUN.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Who the hell thinks the mods here are Nazis? The mods here are great. The idea of deleting low content posts is great once you adjust to it, and you can do tons of things you cant anywhere else; for instance you can use all kinds of blasphemy as long as you don't aim them at your fellow posters, and you can insult an important person of the Escapist and only receive a warning.
Anyway, i been in many places in the internet, but never in IMDB, i personally think that site is crap, it rates classic masterpieces on the same level than modern action movies... I think the Avengers is rated higher than Saving Private Ryan there

The mods themselves tend to be pretty cool, it's the rules they have to enforce that are poorly written. If you really start to look at things, stuff like the objectionable content rule is selectively enforced, because it only exists to ban piracy talk and people posting porn on the forums, yet it's worded in a way that bans talking about porn, illegal activities (including drug use) and piracy in a positive manner -- even advocating a change in the law is technically against that rule.

That's a low hanging fruit example, but the rules are full of them. They're terribly written, even Gamefaqs has a better TOS, that bans all the same thing the Escapist's one is supposed to, without banning the stuff it's not. Then again the Gamefaqs moderators actually /are/ terrible[footnote]From what I've heard. For the most part they just seem to be spread too thin, from what I can tell.[/footnote], so pick your poison.