"A Board in a Plain Brown Wrapper" - The Solution to SFMB

"Poking a bear in front of an audience makes you a legend. Poking a bear in an empty room just makes you an idiot."

-Gus Mead





There are a few places I still visit in Daria fandom. One of them is Creative Writing, where I still write but just not as often as I used to. The other is the Daria Fandom Blog II, which is a good summary of what's being produced by the fandom - even though the social context is entirely absent. I have reached the fannish state known as GAFMOI - "getting away from most of it". Like one of Buddha's disciples, I still strive for GAFIA, to "get away from it all".

I suspect that the goal of visiting any message board should never be to make friends with the entire community and to become a legend in your own mind. That would be like going to a bar and trying to buy a round for the house every night. The goal should be to find a select few people and a good table. If you could meet those people in another setting that would be great, but some people are pretty private and they want to limit their interactions with you to a particular bar in a particular town. Which is fine. As for the bar called PPMB, I only go there to meet those very few people I can't meet anywhere else on the Web.

If those few people stopped showing up...I would no longer visit PPMB. What would be the point of going back? It would be like visiting a bar with a bunch of strangers in it. To stretch this tortuous analogy, I have started to visit...other bars. I spend about 90 percent of my time in those other bars now. I still drop by the old PPMB, attach a post to the message boards when necessary, go to the bartender and pick up any messages. That takes me about 10 minutes and I get on with the rest of the day. I still can't imagine not visiting the PPMB...but as George Harrison said, "All things must pass."

Someone at the bar pointed me in the direction of a decaying flyer on the bar. "Save the SFMB!" it said.

Ah yes. That bar. I would have thought the rats would have eaten it by now. Every now and then, I'll drive by it, just to see if it's still standing. It appears to still be there, but the place is virtually empty with a rapidly shrinking clientele. It got the reputation as being a dangerous bar.

"But CINCGREEN!" you wail. "Wasn't the old Scorched Remnants bar a dangerous bar?"

Well, yes it was. If you were an asshole. We threw a lot of assholes out of that place. (You just can't let certain people with a nasty attitude walk into your bar.) SFMB, however, not only couldn't tell the difference between a paying customer and a real prick, a bunch of their customers who were into rough trade would dry-gulch some innocent, beat the living shit out of him (or her) in the back room, rape him (or her) and then throw the bloody carcass into the back alley. And then brag about what bad-asses they were all night. Since the Night Crew were friends with the ownership, nothing happened.

The bar got the reputation of being one of those 19th century bars in old San Francisco. One second you were sipping your white wine spritzer; the next you found yourself on a steamboat bound for China and forced to pay off your passage with hard labor.

So what happened? People stopped going. Yeah, they might have not taken any part in what was going on there. But they knew it, and no longer wanted to bless the bar with their patronage. To quote the great American philosopher Yogi Berra - "If people don't want to go to the ball game...how are you going to stop them?"

This is a rule about message boards it took me about 10 years to learn, so I'll share it with you. There's a lot to be said about Dramatic Exits from Message Boards. Hey, even I've made a Dramatic Exit. Most of the people who make the Dramatic Exits are drama queens, and their exiting the message board is usually greeted with the appropriate scorn.

However, the other 95 percent of the public do not make dramatic exits. They just stop going. Remember that restaurant that you went to for five years? Remember when the quality of service collapsed and you begin to suspect that the hamburgers were no longer made of cow flesh? Did you get up on a chair, call for the attention of the remaining patrons, and scream "Let me tell you a few things about this shitty restaurant?"

No. You didn't do that. No one does that. You. Just. Stop. Going.

(* * *)

Messageboard Rule #1:

"People who come to a message board will be glad to tell you why they came, if you ask them. When they stop going, however, they won't bother to tell you why. They just don't show up anymore."

(* * *)

The management of SFMB has now noticed a disturbing lack of patronage. They're trying to figure out where the customers have gone. They have started to ask around. They went to the upscale bar up the street that has been around since forever, the one that makes you behave yourself. They see a lot of their customers over there.

A few customers have said, "Oh, I still like the SFMB! I still show up!" (They just never order drinks.) Some have said, "The PPMB has taken a trend towards silliness" or "Boy, at the PPMB we really miss the old bar fly who would harass the staff." (The management of the SFMB should by now know that their leg is being pulled.) The one customer who hinted at the real reasons is being ignored.

Like a bad restaurant (to stretch the other tortured analogy), cosmetic changes have been discussed. Maybe the old place just needs a new coat of paint. Maybe we need to remove some of the items from the menu that we haven't sold in years. This might fool a few people for a little while but doesn't address the two problems that face the SFMB.

The first is that only two things distinguish the SFMB from the PPMB. The first is the porn. (If you think about it, it was always the porn.) You could get Hot Daria Porn (Hot! Hot!) at the SFMB. Who doesn't like reading a little porn every now and then? Furthermore, the forum was hidden from public view, just as it should be. You had to register to see any of it.

The second was what I call the infamous "slam room". If you just wanted to dry gulch somebody that never did you a damn bit of harm, you could always go to "Flame Wars" and get your sociopathy off your chest. "A nasty place, populated by nasty people."

Unfortunately, the Philosophy of Flame Wars began to become the Philosophy of SFMB. It was never to be stated openly, of course. But since the major flamers were the friends of the management...even someone as dumb as a Daria fan could put two and two together. People started leaving. And what they didn't forsee is that among those people leaving...would be some of the porn writers. This caused fewer and fewer people to show up at SFMB.

So we have the first problem - the slam room killed the porn room, and if someone wants to go to a board known for its slamming, they can go to 4chan. What was the second problem?

The second problem was a complete change in the attitude towards moderation of a message board. Generally, Daria fans like to think of themselves as Independent People Just Like Our Heroine. And these independent mini-Darias never like the idea of a message board moderator telling them what they could and could not say. I didn't, and I said so quite loudly. One of the selling points of SFMB was that Our Moderators Will Never Be Like Those Asshole Moderators at PPMB.

After watching the fallout at the SFMB, however, Daria fandom drew another conclusion. "Yes, the PPMB moderators will always do things we don't like doing. But thank God the PPMB has moderators, because if we didn't we'd end up like the assholes at SFMB."

Even I had come to that conclusion. Kara Wild and Martin Pollard were on the right side of the Moderator Controversy. More painful for me to admit was that they had always been on the right side, way back since 1997-98. You might not like cops...but until humanity changes, without cops there is no civilization. Even CINCGREEN has to admit that. People voted with their feet. Given a choice between the heavily moderated PPMB and the moderator-free zone of SFMB (yes, SFMB has "moderators", but they are ghost figures) the fandom has chosen the PPMB.

As for now, the Moderator Wars are over. PPMB wins. SFMB loses. The SFMB is best illustrated by the history of the old Soviet Union from the 1980s on. Both the SFMB and the Soviet Union might have had the right ideas...but if you botch the implementation, history is singularly unforgiving.

This leaves the SFMB with a limited number of choices. None of them are good.

1. Admit defeat. The SFMB's time might just be...over. It has outlived its usefulness, and someone else will have to pick up the Banner of Porn and carry it as it rises slowly...slowly...ever higher....

2. Bring in PPMB style moderation. One of the reasons that people don't become moderators - aside from the fact that 'no one likes to be friends with a cop" - is that moderation is labor-intensive. A lot of shit will have to be rooted out at SFMB. The board's size will have to shrink. Flame Wars will have to be placed behind a second firewall, the same way that the old Mental Health Ward was - you'll need special permission to have access to Flame Wars even if you have ordinary board registration.

The awful part is that the New Police - if such beings can be found - will have to begin cracking heads almost immediately. Unfortunately, this will most likely involve a change in management that goes all the way up to the top.

3. Stop worrying about it. Hey, Crazy Nutso's Rubber Room never worried about such things! And look at how successful they were!




"Okay CINCGREEN, all and good," you might say, "but what would YOU do if you were SFMB's master?"

But first - I would never be SFMB's master. Let's make that clear. GAFMOI is now a way of life. I don't have optimistic prospects for Daria fandom in the long run.

The first thing I would do is tell people that even though I ran the board -- I would no longer pay for it. I would state that I would not pay the cost of running the board when time came to renew. This would see if there was a core remnant still dedicated to seeing the SFMB being a vital entity and not just a remnant dedicated to mooching off the good will of the management. If someone offered to pony up the cost of another year, I'd know that there was at least one person besides me who gave a damn. (The important thing is to get someone who will pay for it for that one year of revamping.)

The next thing: begin to close off virtually the entire board. Kill every section that hasn't pulled its weight. This means the Fan Fiction section, too. PPMB already does fan fiction better than SFMB, anyway, and SFMB just looks weak and worthless trying to compete.

All that would be left would be The Baa'd Sheep and Flame Wars. Flame Wars would become a By Approval of Management Only board - you wouldn't even see Flame Wars show up unless you specifically asked to see it at the user end. This way, the Exhibitionism of Flame Wars wouldn't infect the rest of the board.

(Actually, if it were me, I'd simply delete Flame Wars. But we are speaking in hypotheticals, so I offer a hypothetical way for Flame Wars to survive.)

After I had haxxord up the board, new members visiting the sfmb.gamerspage domain would see...well, nothing. Just the bare hint that there was a message board, somewhere, if only you had access to it. Right now, all new users see is a dead message board, and I'd rather have no message board than a dead one.

When a new user registered, he or she would see the only surviving forum, The Baa'd Sheep. If he or she asked for Flame Wars access, they'd see that forum as well. If the only things people come for are for porn and for slams, let's not pretend otherwise.

Now: we get a good moderator. Maybe one from the PPMB to work part-time. Flame Wars doesn't want a moderator anyway, and they only need one to kill spam. There won't be much to moderate in The Baa'd Sheep, because it is an "understanding place". However, it would be understood that The Moderators Carry Guns. They will shoot if provoked. Undoubtedly, someone will provoke the board members, and depending on how the moderator responds, we'll see if the SFMB is serious in turning things around.

Finally, we open up the Fan Fiction board. Only moderators may post there. And then SFMB's new management gets down on its knees and begs the really good writers - like The Angst Guy, or whomever - for the right to premiere fiction there for just one day before it gets released at the PPMB. (I'd even call it the "Premiere Forum".) The point is to get people to start visiting SFMB for reasons other than porn or slam. As soon as people begin coming for the fan fiction, drop the premiere function and open the forum up to all writers.



Now to me, all of the above seems to be like an Incredible Waste of Time. After all, if you wanted to do all of that, you don't even need SFMB. Anyone wanting to do the above can just create their own brand new message board.

As a matter of fact...that's just what I would do. Firestone became Bridgestone. Worldcom became MCI. Amway became Quixstar. I think the SFMB has now outlived its brand name power - the SFMB brand name is poison. Re-brand the board. Call it the MTMB, the "Mistress Thea Message Board". Call it something else. But don't call it SFMB. I think SFMB is dead, fer real.

--CINCGREEN, 11 April 2009

P. S.: The Fortress CINCGREEN blog has been moderated by me since Day One. If you comment and the comment doesn't show up in one or two days...well, you can figure it out.