The majority of people these days are members of one forum or another. Forums are very useful things, they're wonderful places where people can find a wealth of information by asking questions for others to answer. There's always a range of people living the life online, hiding behind usernames in cyberspace where they act completely differently to the way they do in real life - not all, but some people do this.
Most forums tend to have their clicky crowd, the people that stick together, who flame the newbies with an initiation of fire and give them a hard time in the beginning until they've proven themselves. You can make some wonderful 'real life' friends through forums, I know I have and I'm very grateful for it.
Sadly though there can be a downside to forums, where just because you might have a differing opinion and aren't afraid to express it, people use it as an excuse to attack you. Members gang up, like a circling pack of wolves moving in for the kill, creating thread after thread just to prove their disapproval that you would dare say anything out of line! Would these people act this way in real life? Probably not! It's easy to say all sorts of things from the other side of a keyboard isn't it?!
Moderating forums is a difficult and important job, where you constantly have to decide what stays and what goes, how far do you let contentious threads and the bickering go, before you hit the 'edit/delete' button? Plus at what point to you decide to ban a poster - which in itself is a bit of a pointless exercise, given that people can just create a new username.
It's very easy to be judgmental on forum threads, you don't know the people in person, so can't really judge if something is real or just a wind up and there are some real wind up merchants out there, who'll do anything to get attention, just as some will create thread after thread on the same topic trying desperately to get a reaction or others on their side - the best course of action in this case is simply to ignore them.
One clever addition to a forum that I'm a member of is the 'friend' and 'foe' lists. If there is a poster who really winds you up the wrong way, you simply make them a 'foe' and voila! You don't have to see their drivel anymore as their posts are ignored by your profile - genius, sheer genius.
I guess the point of this short blog is simply to say that you can't live your life in cyberspace, although many people seem to. Forums are a means to an end and that's the impart information and shouldn't be taken too seriously. It is not real life after all.
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