This is all sorts of wonderful. The sad thing about what happened to the TCJ board is that the posters often aren't any smarter than those at Newsarama. So where can one find adequate Tom Spurgeon levels? One of the things that keeps me reading the Beat despite its dedication to comic book film casting calls over actual comics is the fairly high Tom Spurgeon Level.
"Of course, all comics fans think the comics they read when they were twelve are the greatest comics ever made. It's built into the fabric of fandom itself."
I was twelve in 1994.
I don't think that the comics I read when I was twelve are not the greatest comics ever made. I realize I'm probably in a minority of one, but I'd like to think that people's tastes are capable of changing over time.
You should do a part 2 dedicated to the Bendis Board, Millarworld, Comic Bloc boards, Collectors Society CGC boards, CBR boards, Panel and Pixel. Since what you've written already is a half-assed guide, you can call this the other cheek.
Painting everyone with the same brush the way Ms Garrity does the DCMB is just about as shallow-minded, unprincipled and indicative of cognitive thinking skills as she has attempted to describe the members of that site. There's just enough truth (in her mostly EXTREMELY UNFAIR) judgments to snooker in other, uninformed people into believing EVERYTHING, true&fair or OTHERWISE, she's wrote about the "cons" of the DCMB.
We have our own thread over there as a form of rebuttal.
Errr, don't let my grammatical and punctuation errors in my last post stand as "proof" of Ms Garrity's charges re: the low reading/writing aptitude of most DCMB posters. There's no "re-edit" feature here for posters to correct themselves, unlike at DCMB and many other sites.
Uh yeah, I realise this is the half-assed guide, but... the DC message board is split into 5 or 6 separate forums for each imprint (DC proper, Vertigo, Wildstorm etc.) and each of these has its own distinct character, as an hour's skim-reading can attest. The description above might well apply to the main DC area (I wouldn't know) but I can vouch that anyone coming to DC's Wildstorm forum in hopes of movie gossip, naked-women discussions or a preschool reading level will be sadly disappointed. Instead we have chats with comic book creators, serious-ish reviews of comic books, links to interviews and articles, more or less civil arguments about all aspects of the Wildstorm imprint, and not a woman-hater in sight. Some of us can even spell.
Funny article. I have been a regular visitor to Byrne Robotics, Newsarma, and the DC message boards and your assessment of each is pretty spot on. The biggest problems many message boards have is little to no moderator activity forcing people to behave, instead bad and offensive behavior is allowed and encouraged.
Yeah, it's really hard nowadays to find a comic book message board where fans alongside collectors can chill out & relax to discuss about they really enjoy, what they recommend and sharing their latest treasure that they bought.
I'll be browsing the site to see if there's a nice community of fans that I can interact with.
This was cute and all, but I really don't think my "Bryan Talbot" thread is/was comparable to fans moaning and groaning about the latest indignity suffered by the "One True Green Lantern." The mere fact that it had enough distance to say "extreme dislike" rather "hate" ought to signal as much, but I suppose fans are all about missing signals in a convenient fashion.
Talbot published an unsubstantiated rumor about Dave Sim. I criticized the morality of his doing so. It's not my fault that the thread devolved into trolldom.
Isn't rating boards according to Spurgeon's approval a little like rating henhouses as to how well the fox likes them?
"The biggest problems many message boards have is little to no moderator activity forcing people to behave, instead bad and offensive behavior is allowed and encouraged."
You forgot to include the MASTERWORKS message board. Not only do you have "trolls" (and the moderators forbid anyone to use that term except themselves), but the moderators ENCOURAGE the troll-ish activity, when they aren't making threats or trying to tell someone else how to run a website.
Despite a LOT of intelligent, interesting members and quite a few long-running and fascinating discussions, I was recently forced to leave, because the above behavior was just getting on my nerves too much.
