Ahhh.. for the days when the internet had no control and deletion of anything. All organizations were a private group of people with similar views who often had all equal power so there was no banning. More often a new person who didn't belong in the group and attempted it would get flamed until they left. Occasionally in some groups wars would break out but there was no mod to settle it. Eventually after days, weeks, months they would agree to disagree, someone would leave cause the group sided against them, or the whole group dissolved and you found a new one to try again. Oh did we reign over our little corners of the internet with no one to tell us what to do except ourselves and our equals.

Um, yeah, remember for some IT IS their business, I hang out on gun sites, they have volunteer mods, actually hang on one site because it has a basement (yeah it ain't the break room (mod chat) but well the hair ain't up.

The format was changed, people did lots of work, the point was either ease of use, or more money, or both,
OR the hosting software (like V bulletin or such) interesting I though MC ran this on V bulletin, but I don't see the corporate stuff.

I would add a 4th reason to the list: Those that are forced to because they have no local outlet for discussion of whatever given topic. I have a pretty active social life and, granted, do get burned out on social interaction, but there are few interested in the subjects that I enjoy talking about that I can easily meet up with.

That being said, I have been on the other forum in question and rarely if ever notice serious issues. Then again, I primarily frequent the Breeds, Breeding and Showing board, the meat board, and the breeders and hatcheries board. There used to be a thread in the Random (or whatever it's called) board for people that were in state, but we pretty much all migrated to Facebook so I have no reason to see the chit chat or deal with the more social/chit chat groups. I get all the socializing I need through the more, hmm...learning-based conversations might be the phrase I'm looking for?

Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. There is plenty to be learned there and plenty of ways to avoid the drama.

What bothered me was what I would call bullying from others, if a person made comment or posed a question that wasn't a "correct" way of doing things or thinking maybe from being a newbie, ect. I have to say that I only 'lurked' at BYC bc I was just afraid of saying the wrong thing. That isn't the only forum that I have seen this happen, I watched this going on, on a horse forum and it ended up that some people that lived around the person that would make some unpopular comments, (I also didn't agree with the comments) but they blocked this person, then they planned on wrecking this persons reputation and spoke freely about it. I couldn't stomach it and left. When I ended up on BYC and read how vicious some were there, I just wanted to be educated, not attacked.

This board is running on a somewhat modified phpBB 3.x. The script is GPLed, and there are no legal restrictions on removing the branding. I do this because malicious scripts (the ones responsible for a lot of "hacked" forums), and spambots both exploit Google and other search engines by looking for the "Powered by..." and copyright lines of well known scripts. We have very little spambot activity here compared to other similarly active forums that leave those lines visible.

About the only "drawback" as it were, is their support forum insists you keep the branding if you want their help. That's fine, not unreasonable, and not to sound totally arrogant, but I helped people on there a lot more than I ever asked for help, so I'm unconcerned. It's not nearly as pleasant a place as it was some years ago, so I don't often do that anymore either.

Btw, I HATE VB, absolutely hate it. What braindead idiot decided it would be a good idea to store all the forum's image files as binary blobs in a MySQL database, as well as all template HTML.... Yuck!

Yes, PulpFaction, you are right. I hope I didn't offend anyone with that!

I've said something similar in the past, just forgot to put it there.

__________ Mon Jan 30, 2012 10:56 am __________

And I just went to check the age of some chicks I picked up and I ended up bidding on FBCM..oops

Interesting!