Me, Myself and Forums

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Mortis
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Me, Myself and Forums

Postby Mortis » Wed Mar 29, 2006 13:22

I've noticed that lately we all have been less focused on writing with or to each other. After all, writing - like any activity related to relaying messages - is communitative and therefore it is not a wonder there's not much discussion going on in the blogs or the forums.

I hope you all realize that while we really have no say in how you decide to use what we (Smeagol, Enok and I) offer to you as services, we're of course the more delighted the more you take an initiative to embrace these features! While I would, of course, like to try to blatantly direct attention towards everything that interests me under the sun, there's only so much responsibility I can take as an instigator.

Therefore, the new philosophy forum is, among other things, something that does require some responsibility - or rather, response - from its users and I would really like to underline that the more you pursue to use these faculties, the better the conversations become.

In the past, I've done a few network courses at the university, and usually the setting fails to ignite the flame of discussion. They dud. Students aren't interested enough to really maintain any kind of discussion - why would they? But in this particular case, we have a tremendous opportunity to take the initiative to mark things down and catalog our discussions in a different sense than in irc.

I would then finally like to conduct a short survey (no polls) regarding your personal history and/or relationship with these so-called bulletin boards or forums; I'm only interested in a brief response of what kind of experience you have of such methods of communication, and if you don't have any, why not?

I'm only asking because while it may not seem so, me and Smeagol are on a 24/7 lookout for better ways of implementing features that further enhance the usability of this site. Feedback, people, feedback!

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Postby Armand » Wed Mar 29, 2006 14:35

I'm a forum noob Embarassed

I've seen the effort to join a forum only very few times, and even more rare have been the occasions when I actually post something. That doesn't mean I wouldn't be keeping up with the going-on, though Cool

But yea, as we finns say, "tyhjästä on paha nyhjästä". Quickly translated, that would be something like "it's hard to scrape up something from nothing".

PS. I don't think I have any specific reasons for 'why not', but what I do know is this forum is the most usable I've encountered so far, so any shortcomings are surely not due to technical issues. Nothing wrong with the tools, the users have the ball now~~

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Postby Smeagol » Wed Mar 29, 2006 19:36

I've been running about some forums for a while, mostly as a reader though, only to post <10 posts in like 3 years Razz

One forum i love and hate is called TBG (the buyer's guide), it's great for fast answers, but the people on there are linguistic experts, or so they claim they are and will point everywhere you have written a word apart or put your dot in the wrong place. But if you can ignore all those sidetracks in your thread it's quite alright.

other than that, i'm a member on The Kinetik (some multi-purpose forum much like our own), Oblivion board (posted a bug), hm.. Sweclockers,99mac,osx86project (some random problemsolving forums).
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Postby Mortis » Wed Mar 29, 2006 20:17

One term for someone who reads but doesn't post that I personally fancy is "lurker". I find it to be peculiarly appropriate, after all, there's a great sense of voyeurism involved whenever you keep your identity out of the observation process.

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Postby nobile » Wed Mar 29, 2006 20:25

Forum noob too =P
Actually, I've only been in three forums that I can remember, Destiny, Slowdays and one that appears on Slashdot =D On the last one I just read what funny things people say there, so you could say I'm sort of a lurker =P
I managed to talk quite a lot on Destiny, back in the day, don't know how I did that =D Even though I like Slowdays topics and everything, I find it very hard to reply, most because it takes a lot of time to come up with a proper answer, it wouldn't be polite just to babble a quick response in the philosophy forum =) and so far it seems that I don't have much time to think that kind of stuff =/ *feels embarrased for not answering in there* Embarassed
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Postby vrap » Wed Mar 29, 2006 21:14

After the Existence forum just fizzled out for the last time (which must have been it's millionth time) I basically reduced my forum posting activity everywhere by about 80%. I frequent many message boards, of very different interests. But in the last few years I've become a lurker, posting and then lurking in tidal fashion. I basically am just not the kind of person that fits the forum whore mentality, so I post rarely, but I take so much from what I read. It's a one-way phenomenon, there are boards like Polycount, an art/computer graphics oriented forum that I've lurked on for years from where I've gained so much knowledge relating to computer graphics and games technology bedcause of the level of discussion. Other boards, like that of a certain comic book author's which I joined aages back when I was obsessed with comics, I've been lurking there for pretty damn long too, and I've gained a lot about different topics not only comics.
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Re: Me, Myself and Forums

Postby Darkelth » Sun Aug 31, 2008 17:56

Haha, my boriness has taken me in the history of Slowdays forums, posting up some old topics...

I could say I'm a forum noob for international forums. I'm a common visitor in some Finnish forums, and actually I'm a moderator in perhaps possibly the biggest gaming forum in Finland called Peliplaneetta.net. I'm not the type who posts much, more likely I read others' post, and possibly reply my own. There's some forums where I just read, and as an example, in peliplaneetta I also post more replies.

But in international, English forums, I'm a noob. Air Buccaneers is one forum where I speak more, but.. That's it. Few years ago I visited dragonlanceforums daily, but not anymore for a long time.

The problem with Slowdays forums is perhaps that we all (I think?) are ircers. In forums, you use more time in one reply, when at IRC, you just type something and that is. In our bulletin' board, you mostly just speak things with more time used. At irc, you can speak about big, or small things. That's the advantage.

But our bulletin' board is still good to have over here. We have few more popular and active threads (though Vicious circle has suffered inactivity for a while already).
If you want to be happy for a day, drink alcohol. If you want to be happy for a year, get yourself married. If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, start gardening. - An old Chinese aphorism.

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Re: Me, Myself and Forums

Postby Mortis » Tue Sep 09, 2008 16:11

Looking back, my habits haven't changed to one direction or another, as I still prefer reading over writing by quite the margin. I often only consider responding when I feel I have something concrete or acute that contributes to the discussion. Otherwise, I cannot really justify to myself spending the energy that goes into devising good enough a post.

I do find that if/when I discover well-thought out commentary or something refreshing, it lowers the bar for writing considerably. This is perhaps why I like to think that forums allow us to maintain, generally speaking, a high signal-to-noise ratio, and should be taking advantage of that. In terms of the IRC/forums dichotomy, the main advantage with forums over ircing is obviously its reusability thru clear-cut archival. Not to discount IRC - it's a major lifeline, but like all things in life, becomes a repetitious event in which you can discover a cyclical pattern of content: You don't grow wiser just because you get older... :D

Sometimes it feels as though having grown up with the advent of the internet, we quite don't know how to value the essence of the rewrite. Iterating makes it easier for me to discover the "essence" of whatever I wanted to do or say!
"...the public dissolves as fact and fiction blend, history becomes derealized by media into a happening, science takes its own models as the only accessible reality, cybernetics confronts us with the enigma of artificial intelligence, and technologies project our perceptions to the edge of the receding universe or into the ghostly interstices of matter." - Hassan, Ihab: "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism" (1987).


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