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General Chat Thread - Come to #spp-misc on Discord! https://discord.gg/3u9nKEa

Auraninja

Eh, ragazzo!
I remember Josh's gf Jenny who was also a mod here. I remember when one of my friends back then was trying to be sarcastic about something Josh did and she lashed out. There was also that one time was trying to play along with a snarky comment she made in the Java chat back in the day, and she replied, "No one likes you either, homo." Man, I had some awful memories back when we had the Java chat. People harassed me for multiple things. Someone asked for me to send them porn pics, and another relentlessly trolled me.

Edit: I also remember Josh having a YTMND back when that site was popular, and he made fun of a member on Serebiiforums saying they were going to kill themselves. Man, the myspace suicide joke is just a snippet of a culture that makes fun of mental illness.
 
Communities based around edginess and internet tough guy-hood are garbage and should be a thing of the past. The existence of Something Awful and sites like it really damaged a lot of people's brains huh

edit also speaking of **** tier misc mods, remember Ethan? Didn't he lie about his dad sending him to gay conversion camp or am I mixing up a bunch of stories now. If that was the case, god I was really not angry enough about that way back when.

No. It was a story Josh made up as a "prank" He literally made the entire thread admiral wtf
 
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The Admiral

the star of the masquerade
No. It was a story Josh made up as a "prank" He literally made the entire thread admiral wtf
Well, I did imply I didn't remember.

But I think Josh stayed a mod after that, for some reason. (That "some reason" being I don't think anyone further upstairs was paying attention to how shittily the site was being moderated, and of course, Internet Culture at the Time.)
I remember Josh's gf Jenny who was also a mod here. I remember when one of my friends back then was trying to be sarcastic about something Josh did and she lashed out. There was also that one time was trying to play along with a snarky comment she made in the Java chat back in the day, and she replied, "No one likes you either, homo." Man, I had some awful memories back when we had the Java chat. People harassed me for multiple things. Someone asked for me to send them porn pics, and another relentlessly trolled me.

Edit: I also remember Josh having a YTMND back when that site was popular, and he made fun of a member on Serebiiforums saying they were going to kill themselves. Man, the myspace suicide joke is just a snippet of a culture that makes fun of mental illness.
I remember Jenni, she was a real winner too. But I guess it's not surprising that an asshole's significant other will be an asshole too.
 

bobjr

You ask too many questions
Staff member
Moderator
Something Awful is kind of a unique example, where most of the people have gotten older and grew up in term of behavior. Especially considering transphobic language and using words like retarded alone have gone very out of style.

It doesn't help that the original owner was super lazy and turned out to be an abuser as well, and sold the website to one of the site programmers who seems to actually want a functioning place.
 

GrizzlyB

Confused and Dazed
Part of that was because of Josh. He went out of his way to create a forum culture where funny people had more leash than other members, even if they were deliberately trolling. If you weren't sufficiently funny, you were slapped with an infraction or a ban, i.e puberty thread, which was the most the most grotesque moderation I've ever seen. They let the thread stay up, signaled to others it was okay to joke and be playful, but when people inevitably got sort of cringe with it, they slapped everyone with two week bans.

You had all these people trying to carve themselves out a spot in the funny edge lord clique because the culture went out of it's way to encourage it, but the issue was there were people that just didn't get how to do that, and the method of "moderating" the unfunny ones was to troll them into submission, so Misc. got the reputation as the "problem" forum which was constantly **** talked by other mods and was over corrected when new moderation eventually came in. It was always funny too because Josh would constantly whine and complain that people were "trying to be him" Yeah no ****ing **** dude, who else would people try to be given the environment

Though, to be fair JB these macros you were talking about were massive brony images people found cringe.

@ Generalized threads killing activity

This mostly boils down to what mods feel like doing I think. I thought social groups were cool but they died because moderators didn't wanna **** with it, which is fair. Back when the forum was active, sifting through every article someone thought was newsworthy I imagine was tedious/ a pain. So you needed someone willing to delete the thread (to prevent clutter) and PM the user informing why their thread was closed and do that for like 8 or 9 threads in an evening. At any rate I definitely think its something to evaluate on a situational basis.

Pokemon's fan base is much older now, most of us aren't teenagers anymore and have a relatively decent grasp of topics like what's newsworthy and what isn't.
Yeah, there was definitely at least one instance I remember where I was shitposting in a thread with a couple of other people, and Josh came in to ban them, and I was like, "Oh, ****, my time has come." But then I didn't get banned, so I just laid low for a little bit, but this makes more sense in retrospect. The puberty thread was funny to me because Cipher arbitrarily decided that it had run its course and decided to put it out of its misery, which I got caught up in somehow and DID get banned for, but not by Josh. And that was when Dratini's Den came around, which was one of those spinoffs that gets canceled before the halfway point of season 1, but I enjoyed it for those few weeks.

Social groups were also fun for a minute, there. I remember being part of a group that was just a few of us doing unfiltered shitposting or w/e, until they instituted a ban on, like, no exclusive groups or whatever, and they died off shortly after. But "The Prof Babypus Grizzlyking Show" will always live on in my heart! Or at least that's how I remember it. But I am surprised they did away with them, since they seemed like the Clubs forum except kind of actually controlled who could post in them (though I'd guess they were harder to actually moderate, which was probably a factor).
I remember Josh's gf Jenny who was also a mod here. I remember when one of my friends back then was trying to be sarcastic about something Josh did and she lashed out. There was also that one time was trying to play along with a snarky comment she made in the Java chat back in the day, and she replied, "No one likes you either, homo." Man, I had some awful memories back when we had the Java chat. People harassed me for multiple things. Someone asked for me to send them porn pics, and another relentlessly trolled me.

Edit: I also remember Josh having a YTMND back when that site was popular, and he made fun of a member on Serebiiforums saying they were going to kill themselves. Man, the myspace suicide joke is just a snippet of a culture that makes fun of mental illness.
Jenni was a mod? That must have been even before my time. I feel young again! Also, I didn't know they were cybering -- learn something new every day, I guess!

And I trust/hope that said member wasn't Mewskitty.
Well, I did imply I didn't remember.

But I think Josh stayed a mod after that, for some reason. (That "some reason" being I don't think anyone further upstairs was paying attention to how shittily the site was being moderated, and of course, Internet Culture at the Time.)

I remember Jenni, she was a real winner too. But I guess it's not surprising that an asshole's significant other will be an asshole too.
It is kind of... idk, concerning, let's say, that you pre-emptively got mad at somebody who was on the receiving end of it, due to your mis-remembering of events. I gather you didn't care much for Ethan, but in effect, it's inventing reasons to get mad at somebody I assume you haven't interacted with in years. I'm not trying to put you on blast here, just saying that it's extremely spiteful behavior.

And as was said, Josh was the one who made it all up. And maybe this is recidivist of me, but I still kinda think it's funny. Then again, I remember when he put it up, Ethan had either told me or made a post that he was going to be out of town and not online, so I never believed it was true in the first place -- which is probably why Josh did it then. (But I still didn't want to post any jokes in it, like, on the offhand chance that he thought he was going on vacation but was actually shipped out to a gay camp or something like that.)
 

The Admiral

the star of the masquerade
And I trust/hope that said member wasn't Mewskitty.

Well, that's not a name I've heard in a while... or thought about.

And as was said, Josh was the one who made it all up. And maybe this is recidivist of me, but I still kinda think it's funny. Then again, I remember when he put it up, Ethan had either told me or made a post that he was going to be out of town and not online, so I never believed it was true in the first place -- which is probably why Josh did it then. (But I still didn't want to post any jokes in it, like, on the offhand chance that he thought he was going on vacation but was actually shipped out to a gay camp or something like that.)

Now that you mention it, I remember Ethan posting that he was going on vacation in a more public space.
 
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Auraninja

Eh, ragazzo!
Jenni was a mod? That must have been even before my time. I feel young again! Also, I didn't know they were cybering -- learn something new every day, I guess!

And I trust/hope that said member wasn't Mewskitty.
I don't remember if she was a mod, but even if she wasn't, her association with one gave her power in these forums.

If you're asking about the member talking about suicide, I think they had a name like "treehugger" or something like that.
Keep in mind this was a memory from like 2006 or something.

I also might have seen Josh on Facebook. I saw this guy bashing a member on these forums, and the first name was Josh.
There is a fair chance it wasn't Josh, granted. I would go into more detail, but I don't want to relay details on which member he was bashing.
It's just that this guys attitude reminded me a lot about the Josh here.
Edit: I could just be crazy and just got a Josh vibe from a different Josh.
 
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Yeah, Jenni definitely had a mean streak. What I always found odd about her was the meanness wasn't couched in wit, or sarcasm, or over the top Britishness meant to be performative, like, it was just straight up meanness, no punch line, no style

@Admiral I mean, looking back on Ethan's posts admittedly he did seem very angry a lot of the time. I think he over reacted to people a lot and was just kinda uppy downy moody swingy in general. I only commented because misremembering is one thing, it just seemed like that in particular was a very bizarre misremembering.

I found the gay camp thread funny at the time too, honestly, but looking back on it, it looks pretty bad. There were members actually wanting to call the police about it, potentially that could have been a really serious situation had Ethan not told anyone about the vacation. It's also just kind of strange in general to make someone's sexuality the butt of a joke - Josh was in his what, early mid twenties and Ethan was 18.

But also, like, what was the joke? Your moderator has been shipped off to be tortured and endure religious psychological abuse...lol jk not really? I'm not necessarily opposed to low bar dark humor but again, optically it's just really weird for a grown ass man to do to a teenager.

I barely remember Dratinis den, but I do remember SPPF wiki which everyone just used to troll the **** out of eachother. Some pages were pretty funny but Joe reported it and got it shut down within like, 3 days
 
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bobjr

You ask too many questions
Staff member
Moderator
This isn't a defense of the behavior but it's really interesting to see how jokes about gay people has changed in the past decade. The late 00's-early 10's had a lot of ironic edginess to it, where being LGBT itself wasn't seen as bad, but a lot of the terms especially were used like crazy.

Of course there was also people who used that as kind of a shield to get away with their own bigoted views.
 

Auraninja

Eh, ragazzo!
Since we were on the topic of previous mods. I remember this.

We had a moderator named Eszett who for a while seemed like a reasonable down-to-earth mod.

That was until we had a thread mentioning an incident where someone killed a dog in a rather sadistic way. He chimed in to say that if the dog was owned by someone, then they should be charged with destroying property, but if it wasn't, he didn't care. This really irked me, but I never really said anything to him. One person who had more guts than me called him out on it, just to be mocked by someone else. He later changed his profile caption to "I'm a puppy killer :<" or something like that, while shielding actual criticisms that people had with him.
 

The Admiral

the star of the masquerade
Since we were on the topic of previous mods. I remember this.

We had a moderator named Eszett who for a while seemed like a reasonable down-to-earth mod.

That was until we had a thread mentioning an incident where someone killed a dog in a rather sadistic way. He chimed in to say that if the dog was owned by someone, then they should be charged with destroying property, but if it wasn't, he didn't care. This really irked me, but I never really said anything to him. One person who had more guts than me called him out on it, just to be mocked by someone else. He later changed his profile caption to "I'm a puppy killer :<" or something like that, while shielding actual criticisms that people had with him.
I remember that dude being okay and pretty smart about some odd subject matter, and then turning into a real jerk at one point... but I don't remember if that was the turning point.

Still, yikes. Granted, I think this is how a lot of people who "care about animals" actually feel (i.e. they're only concerned about certain animals, and care more about domesticated animals than wild), but most haven't got the gall to actually say it, for reasons that are probably understandable.
 
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Peter Quill

star-lord
All of this just reminds me that I took this forum far too seriously when I was an active member.

Decided to look up the "Meets me at the flagpole" thread, which apparently was posted here over 10 years ago. jfc.
 

GrizzlyB

Confused and Dazed
I mean, looking back on Ethan's posts admittedly he did seem very angry a lot of the time. I think he over reacted to people a lot and was just kinda uppy downy moody swingy in general. I only commented because misremembering is one thing, it just seemed like that in particular was a very bizarre misremembering.

I found the gay camp thread funny at the time too, honestly, but looking back on it, it looks pretty bad. There were members actually wanting to call the police about it, potentially that could have been a really serious situation had Ethan not told anyone about the vacation. It's also just kind of strange in general to make someone's sexuality the butt of a joke - Josh was in his what, early mid twenties and Ethan was 18.

But also, like, what was the joke? Your moderator has been shipped off to be tortured and endure religious psychological abuse...lol jk not really? I'm not necessarily opposed to low bar dark humor but again, optically it's just really weird for a grown ass man to do to a teenager.

I barely remember Dratinis den, but I do remember SPPF wiki which everyone just used to troll the **** out of eachother. Some pages were pretty funny but Joe reported it and got it shut down within like, 3 days
I think Ethan was also younger than the other mods, at least the Misc ones. I think he was also at a tumultuous point in his life... but that's more personal stuff I remember hearing that I probably shouldn't go on about, lest I misremember something or get too personal. BUT his drug experimentations did lead to him posting this late one night, which Cipher (iirc) immortalized in this meme-thing, which I had on my computer and now share because I still think it's funny:
image.png


Anyway, I took the liberty of looking around the gay camp thread and I think I figured out how it came to be. It looks like, in the chat thread, someone posted they hadn't seen Ethan for a few days and wondered why, and Josh quipped about him being sent off to gay camp, claiming Ethan had posted about it in the advice thread (which of course he didn't). Another user claimed to have seen said post, instantly giving Josh's fabricated claim credibility, and it seems like he decided to just run with it and make the thread (complete with a heart-filled Blingee of Ethan, which was one of the reasons I thought it was so funny). I think the butt of the joke were really the people with the over-the-top reactions, not Ethan. But YMMV, I guess.

Yeah, DD lasted like, a month, tops, because they only invited like a couple dozen people in the first place, so it was quickly even deader than this place is now. The Wiki was terrific for like a month, but once Cipher opened it up to the general public, all hell broke loose... which is funny in its own way. I honestly wish it was still around, because we likely would've documented a bunch of this history that we can all barely remember now. Apparently it violated the ToS of what Wikias can even be about, though, so it probably wasn't long for this earth whether or not it turned into a flamewar or Joe reported it or whatever.
This isn't a defense of the behavior but it's really interesting to see how jokes about gay people has changed in the past decade. The late 00's-early 10's had a lot of ironic edginess to it, where being LGBT itself wasn't seen as bad, but a lot of the terms especially were used like crazy.

Of course there was also people who used that as kind of a shield to get away with their own bigoted views.
Yeah, just looking through old posts for my research above, I saw way more autism references than I feel like I've seen across the whole internet in the past year. Things certainly do change... although, without focusing on any one subject matter in particular, I do feel like people have, for the lack of a better term, had sticks up their asses for the better part of the last decade. It's definitely important to be sensitive to marginalized groups, but I feel like society is collectively taking everything too seriously anymore, being more concerned about how things might come across than how they're meant to come across. Kind of a real-world Death of the Author application, which I was never a fan of.
Since we were on the topic of previous mods. I remember this.

We had a moderator named Eszett who for a while seemed like a reasonable down-to-earth mod.

That was until we had a thread mentioning an incident where someone killed a dog in a rather sadistic way. He chimed in to say that if the dog was owned by someone, then they should be charged with destroying property, but if it wasn't, he didn't care. This really irked me, but I never really said anything to him. One person who had more guts than me called him out on it, just to be mocked by someone else. He later changed his profile caption to "I'm a puppy killer :<" or something like that, while shielding actual criticisms that people had with him.
Ah, Eszett. He was so serious about everything, but he actually did a really good job with the Debate section there for a time, making sure people were all structuring their arguments in a meaningful way and etc. (or trying to, at least). I don't remember this dog thing specifically, but like The Admiral, I do remember him being pretty douchey towards the end of his time here.
All of this just reminds me that I took this forum far too seriously when I was an active member.

Decided to look up the "Meets me at the flagpole" thread, which apparently was posted here over 10 years ago. jfc.
I like to think I did a pretty good job of taking the forums un-seriously, but on the downside, I think that was why I was never able to stay plugged into the chats and whatnot where a lot of this drama stuff seemed to fester. It is kinda funny to see all these old names in these old threads, most of whom are banned and I have absolutely no clue why (except for the guy who I remember was PMing pictures of his wang to minors or something like that).
This thread brings back great nostalgia. Once upon a time this thread was full of life.
Yeah, people used to just talk about whatever. But there were a lot more people back when, so if one thing didn't get any traction, another would. Even though I was complaining about the News Thread and all that jack earlier, the core of the matter is that there aren't many people around anymore, so it's really hard to drum up activity. Unless everybody who IS here starts posting a bunch (another forum I'm on has probably ~50 regular users, but generates 200-300 comments most days)... but I can't commit to that!
 

The Admiral

the star of the masquerade
Apparently it violated the ToS of what Wikias can even be about, though, so it probably wasn't long for this earth whether or not it turned into a flamewar or Joe reported it or whatever.
Y'know, for some reason, I never really thought about the idea that Wikia had much in the way of guidelines regarding what you could make wikis about lol seemed like a bit of a lawless land

Wikia, which has since changed its name to Fandom, I suspect both because of the obvious reasons (tie yourself to a common term to make yourself more popular) and also because the name Wikia was probably becoming radioactive due to a lot of the quality of any useful informational resource being spotty at best, and also holy **** was Wikia so laggy back near the end of them using that name.
 

Auraninja

Eh, ragazzo!
@GrizzlyB

I don't feel like trying to sort out a quote from that long post of yours, but speaking of autism, I remember one moderator (Ethereal I think was the last name he took on these forums) saying that he didn't think autism existed.

I'll admit that I used to suck up to this guy some, and while he was not the worst moderator we've had, it goes back to my reply to a thread asking how these threads changed, and I said that moderators have a better understanding of social issues.

As far as who takes offense to what, I try nowadays to separate myself from "edgy" lingo that was popular in the mid 2000's internet. I like to be inclusive, but I don't want to over-analyze everything I say because I could feel bad for a lot of things that potentially affected no one. Now if someone came to me and said that they didn't like the way I said something (and it wasn't a ridiculous claim and the accomodation I must make is reasonable), then it is definitely considerable for me to change the way I talk about that something.
 
Yeah, just looking through old posts for my research above, I saw way more autism references than I feel like I've seen across the whole internet in the past year. Things certainly do change... although, without focusing on any one subject matter in particular, I do feel like people have, for the lack of a better term, had sticks up their asses for the better part of the last decade. It's definitely important to be sensitive to marginalized groups, but I feel like society is collectively taking everything too seriously anymore, being more concerned about how things might come across than how they're meant to come across. Kind of a real-world Death of the Author application, which I was never a fan of.

I'm holding this because using the quotation tags is a huge chore on my cracked up smart phone. But I do think there's some truth to this. It's a pendulum of sorts. I do think optics is important to consider when making any kind of quip, but I hold this more so against people that have the self awareness to know how something will mostly or at least to a large degree be interpreted negatively. If someone said something, a joke or otherwise that just had the misfortune of being poorly phrased and people lose their minds, it's that kind of scenario where I'm more likely to come to their defense.

I remember I was a drinking at a bar a few years ago and the stupid drunk shenanigans for that night was everyone was doing accent imitation because some guy from Texas was with us. Everyone was going around to see who could do the best Texas accent. When it came to me I couldn't think of sentence to come up with so my dumbass says "Suzie and Billy were out in the fields picking cotton" and I have never been so jumped in my entire life. Long story short, everyone called me a racist POS and left me outside a lone and I never drank at that bar again lmao.

I realize ofcourse that obviously invoked racist imagery that people weren't crazy about, but at the same time I was really upset not one person was willing to be understanding of the fact it was an entirely innocent accident. I feel like that sort of thing happens a lot.
 
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GrizzlyB

Confused and Dazed
Y'know, for some reason, I never really thought about the idea that Wikia had much in the way of guidelines regarding what you could make wikis about lol seemed like a bit of a lawless land

Wikia, which has since changed its name to Fandom, I suspect both because of the obvious reasons (tie yourself to a common term to make yourself more popular) and also because the name Wikia was probably becoming radioactive due to a lot of the quality of any useful informational resource being spotty at best, and also holy **** was Wikia so laggy back near the end of them using that name.
Maybe a better way to put it was that is that it violated what was allowed -- iirc, specifically they can't be about real people (I would guess excepting famous/significant ones).

But yeah, Wikias or Fandom or whatever have a bunch of problems. I guess depending on the specific one and who writes them, some are good (like I used Xenoblade's a lot when I was replaying Xenoblade Chronicles), but some are bad and overeditorialized (like Umineko's) -- and all of them are too bloated with advertising and formatting garbage. I use a lot of ad/script blockers, and it's usually a pain to get their websites to actually work.
As far as who takes offense to what, I try nowadays to separate myself from "edgy" lingo that was popular in the mid 2000's internet. I like to be inclusive, but I don't want to over-analyze everything I say because I could feel bad for a lot of things that potentially affected no one. Now if someone came to me and said that they didn't like the way I said something (and it wasn't a ridiculous claim and the accomodation I must make is reasonable), then it is definitely considerable for me to change the way I talk about that something.
Yeah, I feel like I'm (usually) the same way, where I naturally avoid using language that I think can offend or rub people the wrong way -- although I also think that, because I draw my personal line conservatively, that I would resist somebody trying to "correct" something that I've already thought about and determined to be acceptable. Like, when I see language "corrections" like this happen, it usually seems like they're connecting too many dots (i.e. if you say phrase A, it sort of sounds like phrase B, which invokes memories of event C, and event C has something in common with D, which is horrible, so if you say A you're really saying D)
I'm holding this because using the quotation tags is a huge chore on my cracked up smart phone. But I do think there's some truth to this. It's a pendulum of sorts. I do think optics is important to consider when making any kind of quip, but I hold this more so against people that have the self awareness to know how something will mostly or at least to a large degree be interpreted negatively. If someone said something, a joke or otherwise that just had the misfortune of being poorly phrased and people lose their minds, it's that kind of scenario where I'm more likely to come to their defense.

I remember I was a drinking at a bar a few years ago and the stupid drunk shenanigans for that night was everyone was doing accent imitation because some guy from Texas was with us. Everyone was going around to see who could do the best Texas accent. When it came to me I couldn't think of sentence to come up with so my dumbass says "Suzie and Billy were out in the fields picking cotton" and I have never been so jumped in my entire life. Long story short, everyone called me a racist POS and left me outside a lone and I never drank at that bar again lmao.

I realize ofcourse that obviously invoked racist imagery that people weren't crazy about, but at the same time I was really upset not one person was willing to be understanding of the fact it was an entirely innocent accident. I feel like that sort of thing happens a lot.
Yeah, it's like, if someone says something bad in all earnestness, and a large number of people come down on them as if they said it purposefully intending to be rude/offensive/horrible, I think anyone would be naturally resistant to that, so it's important to consider the why/how and not just the what.

Sorry that happened to you, but that's actually a pretty good example. Like, maybe you deserved to feel foolish for saying that, but saying it's racist and shutting you out is just overreacting, imo. This is just me, but I feel like one of the great tragedies of the 2010s is that people started taking Nazis so seriously again. Mel Brooks said one of his life's goals was to make people laugh at Nazis, and now near the end of his life, it's suddenly turning back the other way because of Twitter. Hell, the only Nazi rally I remember seeing referenced before 2014 or so was in The Blues Brothers, when Jake and Elwood drive through a rally of the Neo-Nazi group, the American Socialist White Peoples' Party (ASWPP... asswipe), to thunderous applause from the crowd. It seems like now, a scene like that would get vilified for portraying them at all.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to an individual's inability to properly contextualize how very massive the world is, with the ability of the internet to show you small things from very far away -- and not only show them, but amplify them so that they seem very big. Kony 2012 is always my go-to example of this, but you don't need to get political, or even real-world, to see it. How often does it seem like, in a discussion about entertainment, that everybody thinks something that you don't agree with? (My recent example was a post in a Denver Broncos forum, where a user complained about how "everybody" was hating the moves the general manager was making in the early offseason, even though he'd made some good ones by this point -- of course, in actuality, relatively few people were complaining, this user was just particularly sensitive towards the ones that were. Apply this to TV shows, movies, video games, books, etc., it happens everywhere.) It's a natural, yet unfortunate tendency of humans to naturally react more to things we find distasteful than the inverse... or that's my take, anyway. Hopefully we all learn to adapt and better contextualize information, because right now Facebook/Google/etc. are making a killing on exploiting this aspect of our psychology, and imo it's doing a lot of harm to society.

I don't even feel like going back up to figure out how I landed on this subject -- I figure the thread is dead enough that it can't hurt, anyway.
 

Jb

Tsun in the streets
yeah, i caught a few bans and stuff back when misc. was about being all funny and cool lol. i think one of them actually read "stop trying to be funny"

looking over my pre-6 month ban a lot of stuff i posted was pretty cringe, like all the pony **** even tho i dont even watch or care about it anymore haha. It is kinda funny now tho that memes are pretty much standard on any online discussion place. And yeah, i also agree that moderation was based on who was actually funny and not, i remember something happening and then misc was locked entirely for a few hours (or was it days) and a lot of people ended up getting banned.

Given how young this forums base was at the time, i do feel like some of rules were uneeded. For example there was a rule (might still be one) where it was against the rules to reply to spam. Given that misc was all about being witty, a few times i actually couldn't tell what was spam or legit and actually took a few hits lol

some of the rules did confuse me, i remember this thread https://forums.serebii.net/threads/general-video-game-discussion-silver-version.622876/

a bunch of people that posted in teh first few pages for infracted for spam or something for no reason yet the thread was allowed to stay
 

Rezzo

Occasionally
some of the rules did confuse me, i remember this thread https://forums.serebii.net/threads/general-video-game-discussion-silver-version.622876/

a bunch of people that posted in teh first few pages for infracted for spam or something for no reason yet the thread was allowed to stay

The OVGD subforum was undermoderated for quite some time back then, and a lot of us took advantage of that to varying degrees... The thread you're mentioning was closed (it's different to the one you linked in your post) and infractions galore were handed out. I'm 99% sure that every non-moderator who posted in the thread was infracted as a couple of people ended up banned and thread context was massively overlooked. It's worth mentioning that the thread was also a far cry from being the worst thread that existed at the time yet there was punishment against users who even posted in it normally without breaking any rules.

It was quite common for threads to derail, since a lot of the regulars made it a mission to viciously flame others when they posted certain type of opinion. Again, there were a lot of younger users who posted there and weren't fully aware quite yet of the consequences that are behind posting outlandish opinions, and a combination of that versus the older 'seasoned' users made for regular ****-slinging competitions between users. Again this kind of went through moderation since the only assigned moderator of the subforum at the time wasn't active.

True OGs will who remember a thread loosely named "Worst Video Game You Ever Played?", which at points was receiving 100+ posts an hour and consisted of ten or so people back-and-forth arguing and trolling and just generally creating the largest mess I've ever seen that went undealt with because of mis-appointed moderation

Anyway to get to the point I was trying to make; OVGD had its very own culture of "be funny or be flamed & harassed" perpetrated by some members, one of which eventually ended up being perma-banned and causing their unorganised clique of followers to phase out of activity with them. From what I could make out, it was pretty uncommon for regulars from misc. to post all the way down there (no wait, the OVGD section is now near the top?!), including Josh himself, but interestingly his influence definitely had reach in other parts of the forum where he maybe wasn't as active, and you could see that there were regular members getting away with colourful and scathing behaviour to other users just as much.
 
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