I keep the forums open at www.halloftheblackdragon.com/forums for one reason - It is my open bulletin board to the public, and it is a super, fast way for me to post news articles, women or whatever is on my testosterone flooded mind. However, as a whole, I think that site admins (like myself) have lost the love and wont to launch forums. The reason for this goes beyond not having enough traffic, not having the patience to weed out the spammers or not having enough people to moderate. The problem lies with the internet community as a whole. Now as human beings with religion, morality and parenting, we know how to behave and react to things socially. With the launch of the internet, we were given even more social opportunities with the ability to chat and discuss topics with folks who (had you no internet) you would have never met or shared an opinion with.

This started out well enough until people figured out that they were pretty anonymous outside of an IP address (which doesn’t mean jack) and a liberal screen name. All of a sudden it became fun to be a mean spirited asshole for your own personal humor. I know this well because I have been guilty of it. During the years that Star Wars Galaxies was a new and thriving Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game, I was a frequent poster on the forums spreading my Rebel propoganda along with my online friends. We traded insults and congrats based on the threads and our little community did well for it. However when the game started changing for the worst and boredom settled in I created an alternate screen name and would goad some of the people I disliked into what I presumed to be nerd-rage.

I became a troll god (troll being a person who antagonizes people on forums to get a reaction or just to be a dick). To cap this off, I used the most annoying avatar I could find and topped it off with an insulting signature. The mods had a hard time dealing with me because being a web guy and owning forums of my own, I knew how to push buttons whilst staying within the rules to avoid getting banned. My ultimate reward was when I got over 3 paragraphs of hate typed back at me. In my mind I thought “look at this guy nerd raging at me, ha ha ha, I bet he’s breathing from his mouth”. It was mean spirited but I didn’t see it that way, I saw it as pure entertainment and logging in to troll it up was one of the highlights of being in that game.

That was the past, and I am being candid about it because I want you to understand that I UNDERSTAND why people are dicks on the internet. The thing that keeps this going over time isn’t so much the offenders, its the clueless victims who fail to sense sarcasm and humor behind text. One of my favorite blogs www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.com illustrates this the best. The author will post an obviously sarcastic jab at his race and out of the 400 comments that follow, at least half of them are people getting pissed and wanting to take the guy out. A true troll loves these kinds of people because they keep the flames going.

So after a good amount of years it became common knowledge that forums were the birthplace of trolls. This made people who legitimately wanted discussion on the particular subject stay away from them. It lead to declining numbers in membership and increased effort in moderation… too much work for an admin, for little to no reward. With that, you will see many newer sites avoid the forum community altogether and setup a comments section. Trolls have found this to be a nice medium too but the back and forth arguments are little to none with this method.

I am fine with how it has turned out. Sites have become the blogger on his/her soap box and then a nice period of question and answer to follow. This beats the “assembly hall with the lights out” feeling of a public forum and the people who would anonymously start fires in order to get a rise out of the clueless.

Written by Greg Dragon on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 

Filed under The Nerdiest Topics
Tagged with nerd, star wars galaxies