Did DC get rid of their message boards to stop criticism?

[The Darknight Detective]

It was a frustrating experience most of the time. Half the time, you'd wonder if the thread you were interested in would ever load, and if you were fortunate enough than it did, you only had a 50% chance at best that your reply would post successfully.

And those are just those forums' TECHNICAL limitations. Its social problems are already well-documented.

Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)

The technical problems I could handle, but the social ones would have been problematic for me. If I'm going to have the Wild West experience on a forum, it has to be on one that actually affects my life like a political one. Ranting and raving on a comic-book forum, despite my love for the hobby, just doesn't cut it for me.

[Superdoom]

The technical problems I could handle, but the social ones would have been problematic for me. If I'm going to have the Wild West experience on a forum, it has to be on one that actually affects my life like a political one. Ranting and raving on a comic-book forum, despite my love for the hobby, just doesn't cut it for me.

The wild west experience? Can you not handle other people having different points of view? In the wild west, I would shoot and kill you for saying something like this.

[The Darknight Detective]

The wild west experience? Can you not handle other people having different points of view? In the wild west, I would shoot and kill you for saying something like this.

I'm pretty sure others here know that when I typed "Wild West" that I didn't mean I had to face other posters in the middle of the town at high noon.

[Lee Stone]

I posted in the old DC forums and found them to be full of "holier than thou" fans who knew 90% of everything that had ever happened in DC and the other 10% they made up. But they were still always right.

I don't remember new readers/fans being very welcome there.

IIRC, they were still up when the Byrne Doom Patrol came out and it's sub-forum was full of venom as everyone there seemed to hate him.
Note: I haven't really cared for him much here lately but at the time I was really excited about the series.

[JasonTodd428]

I posted in the old DC forums and found them to be full of "holier than thou" fans who knew 90% of everything that had ever happened in DC and the other 10% they made up. But they were still always right.

I don't remember new readers/fans being very welcome there.

That 'holier than thou' attitude was why I was merely a lurker there. The very few times I posted I was treated like $#!* because I guess some people thought I was completely new to comics at the time when in reality I was a lapsed reader. After a while I stopped going there altogether and started at CBR instead.

[Jim Kelly]

I would guess that someone born in 2000 or after would find the problems, that used to be common on the internet and on old computers, quite frustrating because you would be used to everything just being there in an instant from the time you became aware of such things.

But most of us are older than that and we can remember back to either when the internet didn't exist and computers were these huge affairs that took forever to start up or we can remember at least the late '90s. I didn't even learn how to use the internet until 1999--despite having done computing in high school and university.

For most of us any internet at all is something of a small miracle. Why anyone would get frustrated with that and think it's the Wild West--I don't know. I do worry about kids these days who grow up with this as part of their very existence, vulnerable to bullying and the assassination of their character at long distance.

Our problems back then were nothing like what those born after 2000 will face as they grow up and grow older.

[Sacred Knight]

Nah. It was just woefully outdated. They just went for the vastly more popular and relevant means of online communication, that's all. I would have loved an updated message board myself though, as I still prefer these to Facebook.

[godisawesome]

The one thing I really do miss about the old boards was the subforums that I posted in. There were entire forums dedicated to Robin or Superboy or Supergirl, etc. The Robin subforums in particular seemed pretty civil when I was posting, though I may have just stuck to the right threads. At the time, there were a lot of Tim threads and a few Damian threads, but you also had Fabian Niceiza running a thread concurrently with his writing on Red Robin like a weird combination of FAQ and annotated notes, which was awesome. He posts here occaisionally, but not like he did there.

There biggest issue was that you could tell they weren't being watched. There would be subforums still active for books that weren't being published, or hybrid subforums like the Robin one, where people could stew in anger or get into a fight in an unsupervised corner. But I think the majority of posters in the Robin section seemed civil and on topic. There was a hilarious argument about Tom Hardy's first picture as Bane where a guy went ballistic, which was the only time I've ever had someone take a aggressive and hostile tone towards one of my posts (not constructive-argumentative, hostile), but even then, I see things like that still sneaking through on other forums I visit.

[Master X]

That 'holier than thou' attitude was why I was merely a lurker there. The very few times I posted I was treated like $#!* because I guess some people thought I was completely new to comics at the time when in reality I was a lapsed reader. After a while I stopped going there altogether and started at CBR instead.

People on forums who rate your knowledge on the boad subject by your join date are just...can I even say the bad words here? LOL What's worse is those that actually believe it makes sense that somehow your join date/post count equal knowledge is just outright scary.

[RobinFan4880]

Many companies dumped their forums in favor of social media. It is simply easier to control your message on social media as compared to message boards.

Off the top of my head, the companies that still do run forums (not necessarily comics-related but companies none the less) usually run a very tight ship. You can talk about what you want but it can never get too... Fervent or poisonous.

I miss the desktop wallpapers, and wish they did official podcasts like Marvel.

DC All Access on youtube is kind of DC's answer to Marvel's podcast. They talk about everything DC, comics, games, memorabilia, shows, movies and even to the cons. Complete with interviews with creators, editors and etc.

[Jim Kelly]

Well I did used to wonder sometimes on the boards how it was that we were saying such critical things about DC and somehow getting away with it. I suppose there were some that got drunk with that sense of freedom. In the same way here and on other boards as soon as posters realize they can get away with swearing and nothing's going to happen to them they swear worse than my drill sergeant when I was doing my general military training. Most of us, though, soon see there's no thrill in doing something if you have total license to do it.

I would sometimes remind other posters that we were there at the pleasure of DC. But I really don't think DC was paying attention. Or well, I have to point out there were several iterations of the board, so it depends which one we're talking about. There were some times when people at DC were talking to us. For instance, I remember that the collections editor was communicating with us on the DC Archives board for awhile--when he had that job, but when he left it was like being in Grant's tomb. All you could hear was your own echo.

So I don't think the management even knew the DCMBs existed. Why it existed and why it didn't exist were probably just the result of some paper being pushed from one tray to another. Often the changes in the DCMB came because of something to do with Warner changing their home site. This is probably why some were shouting so loudly on a few of those boards--they were trying to determine if anyone out there was paying attention to them.

To be honest, I was much more frightened of the CBR board and joined it with much trepidation. I'm still scared of it. I don't want to get myself banned (which seems to be much more likely on this board than the DCMB), so I won't go any further than that. This place feels like Russia--or what I imagine Russia to be. The DCMB felt like New York City--a lot of people shouting, possible violence, but as long as you know where you're going you shouldn't get yourself in any trouble and if you're lucky you might come across a celebrity or two.

[PLG1962]

I think its a cop out but i can see the point when it comes to negative criticism if its well written out i don't mind it but just saying "it sucks" i just think yeah but why do you think that elaborate a bit more

[The Darknight Detective]

I would guess that someone born in 2000 or after would find the problems, that used to be common on the internet and on old computers, quite frustrating because you would be used to everything just being there in an instant from the time you became aware of such things.

But most of us are older than that and we can remember back to either when the internet didn't exist and computers were these huge affairs that took forever to start up or we can remember at least the late '90s. I didn't even learn how to use the internet until 1999--despite having done computing in high school and university.

For most of us any internet at all is something of a small miracle. Why anyone would get frustrated with that and think it's the Wild West--I don't know. I do worry about kids these days who grow up with this as part of their very existence, vulnerable to bullying and the assassination of their character at long distance.

Our problems back then were nothing like what those born after 2000 will face as they grow up and grow older.

Okay, I'll play along. Yes, the Internet is unquestionably a more scarier place than it was 20 years ago when I discovered it. However, that wasn't my point. My point was I'd rather not put up with BS about something that, compared to the really important things to debate about, is on the trivial side. When I was a new teen back in the late '70s, I would have felt differently, of course, but I'll be 50 next week and the idea of getting into a heated discussion about this superhero or that superhero film seems just foolish to me.


As I have said before, I love this hobby, but it isn't the upcoming 2016 presidential election to me. Others may disagree, of course.

[Jim Kelly]

One thing I just remembered is that during the last, dying days of the great DC letter pages, they were drawing many of their comments from the message board--because I guess they weren't even getting enough emails to fill a letter page, so they had to comb the message board for material. I remember that even excerpts from some of my posts were put on the letter page. It was a bit embarassing, because I would have rather known my comments were going to be selected for publication, so I could polish the language and frame the comments for a larger audience. Usually on message boards you were just responding to someone else's comment--so without that thread, individual comments lack context. I suppose this is why I often compose my posts to be read out of context--just in case someone should cut and paste them somewhere else.

That would have been the old white on blue/white on grey message board, which was my favourite. I think that had some of the best writing and the best posters--even though from a technical perspective it might have been primitive. When that went down, I don't think the boards that followed were ever as good. Some of the old commenters never bothered to join those new boards--and some like Dave Cockrum and Rich Morrissey had passed away. I think a few of us were bitter that all we had built on that board was deleted and it was too much to try and rebuild that community again. And the further rebootings of the messsage boards proved that we were just writing letters in the sand that would disappear as soon as a new tide came in.

[Joe Kalicki]

I posted a few times on the DC boards, but never anything like a regular. I think I mostly stayed in the LOSH section.