The EggLog

I frequent forums, and have recently developed a couple of distastes to some of the things that often appear on a standard forum.

A personal hate of mine would be: “rate the sig/avatar above you” threads in forums. What a pointless waste of time and webspace! Is it entertaining or interesting in any way? No. I can’t think of any content I could possibly find on the web that is more drole or boring than a load of people making stupid comments about what other people have published in a half hearted attempt to get noticed every time they post. Nothing productive comes of this, not even any sort of enjoyment from what I’ve seen.

Another little forum niggle would be the threads named, “wot r u lisnin 2″. These threads always expand far too quickly fo even the very slightly inattentive browser/forumite. What usually ends up happening is the single thing that should never happen on a forum: posts by people who haven’t read the content. You can see the posters thinking, “I can’t be bothered to read everyone else’s comments, I’ll just have my say.” This isn’t too bad if its just a couple of people per hundred or something, but when it’s everyone it gets a bit ridiculous. You might as well just type your comments in notepad and save it to your hard drive.

One last thing that I recently have encountered regularly (some visitors may know precisely what I am talking about) is the lack of understanding that different people have differing views. When someone states that your opinion is wrong and invalid, they look amazingly silly. Actually, I think that it is fair to say that someone who states that another person’s opinion is invalid instantly invalidates their own opinion. This is a prominent  problem in some smaller forums and has most often led to the forum’s closure due to the lack of people who like having their opinions rubbished.

Having been browsing Wikipedia last week at college (in particular, the article on the ultimate fate of the universe), I spotted a minor spelling mistake and felt that there were one or two sentences that could have been added. I clicked on the edit button, and guess what? The I.P. address had been blocked. The idiots at Q.M.C. had been vandalising pages for “fun”. What kind of person finds messing up a great source like Wikipedia and ruining everyone else’s experience of it fun? What gives these idiots the right to make all the users in the college who wish to improve the site look ridiculous in front of the Wikipedia community? What a bunch of silly heads.