I mentioned yesterday that I was new here and that I was going to create a little bit of an introduction. Here goes.
I’ve spent the past few years posting daily on US Message Board and frequently donated money to keeping their servers online. Unfortunately, the administrators of the site are more concerned about squeezing every last nickel that they can out of the site and their members instead of hosting a quality forum. The site is so cluttered up with advertisements that it is largely unusable. If I spent more than 10 minutes on USMB my laptop fans would kick on full blast and my keyboard would start to get hot. I’m not talking about an old hunk of junk computer either. I’ve got a year old Lenovo ThinkPad which is pretty spec’d out. I voiced my concerns to the administrators and all they did was whine about needing more money from everyone.
Then came the “clean up” messages from the administrators. They told everyone that they were going to clean up the site and start deleting off topic threads. As someone who thinks that everything should be posted in the right place I appreciated this. What ended up happening was they used this “clean up” as an excuse to start deleting threads that they didn’t like. They never confirmed this but my thinking is that any thread or comment that would made their advertisers unhappy got removed. This goes back to my original point of them trying to squeeze every last nickel out of the site and not caring at all about it being functional or useful.
I begrudgingly set off to find a new home. I made new accounts on a multitude of different forums but ultimately landed on this one. I was initially captivated by how usable and intuitive everything is. Everything just seems to work and makes sense. My laptop also doesn’t go into panic mode when I have multiple tabs of this site up. I then started reading a lot of the messages from the admin team here and they seem to be committed to building a quality forum. The ads that are here all seem to be integrated into how this site looks which makes it easy on the eyes. I also like that you can just create an account and start posting. I tried doing that on a few places and all of my posts were immediately stopped for admin review which sometimes took days. Not worth it. This is a smaller forum but there’s no reason why it can’t be one of the biggest ones out there. It probably should be considering how badly the rest of these forms are run.
I used to go there every once in a while. I haven’t been back in a while but I just popped in and you’re right, those ads are painful. It’s almost as unusable as Above Top Secret.
I don’t know anything about that site, but still post on the site I originated from before coming here. Same thing, a lot of ads. So I added Ublock Origin which takes care of the ads.
This is a smaller forum, but I agree with you. It will get bigger as people disgruntled with politically correct moderators deleting posts and opinions move elsewhere.
A similar topic on the other forum I post on will have easily 500 posts, while here it may have 20. However, I’ve learned after the first 100 things tend to go off on tangents and devolve into being not very interesting.
What is offered here isn’t a novel concept (free speech) but refreshing because the owner and moderators haven’t and won’t give into pressures to suppress at the altar of political correctness in a day and age where censorship seems to be the new fashion trend.
Welcome, and I very much look forward to conversing with you!
A lot of people went there after the mass exodus of /pol/ after the r_Donald invasion. They didn’t stay long because of the moderation team who promised free speech but delivered censorship and bans.
Maybe I’m missing something. I run Firefox browser with ad blocker and I don’t see any ads on USMB.
As I recall, they used to display ads on the right side of the screen under a short list of NEW TOPICS. On my screen, all I see is a white vertical strip.
Well - enjoy it. I’m not going back. The ads are only part of the problem. The larger problem is the attitude of the admins and their selective banning of people, threads, and posts.
I hardly ever go there now, I only went this evening to check out the story being told here.
I divorced USMB and married freebird.is a loooooong time ago…the shacked up with Political Bullpen as a founder.
USMB has a habit of hiring biased moderators. They had a couple of good ones, but it’s been so long since I frequented there I’ve forgotten their names.
