Flame Warriors ~ View topic

Clueless Newb Joined: 01 Feb 2008 Posts: 18

This event typically occurs in forums which were mostly private and/or hidden from the major search engines, but suddenly wind up listed prominently or linked from a site with major traffic. This sort of thing also tends to happen on forums which discuss some fandom topic that suddenly caught on and became popular to the masses.

All of a sudden, a smaller, tightly-knit forum that had mostly oldbies, is flooded with a huge pile of newbies who disrupt the forum's balance and peaceful nature. This isn't to say the newbies are particularly good or bad, but the sudden flood of new blood tends to annoy the older members right away and start up considerable conflict.

Typically such a forum splits into distinct sections, the oldbies segregating themselves somewhat from the newbies by ignoring their posts, or in severe cases, blatantly telling the newbies to get lost. Of course this kind of behavior starts up flame wars almost immediately. Sometimes this can even start flame wars among the veterans over how to properly deal with the flood of annoying new members. This can quickly destroy a well-established forum if handled improperly by the Admins, Mods and Royals. Meanwhile, many newbies who are otherwise decent people might be put off by the whole unwelcoming attitude and start rival forums. This can sometimes be a good thing, if it relieves some of the pressure on the old forum.

Eventually some of the newbies may brave the hostile waters of the forum and adequately prove themselves to be constructive, peaceful denizens, upon which the animosity towards the newbies tends to wane and the conflict winds down.

I have an example, though I will not provide the link unless specifically asked for it (I have my reasons for this):

Cloud x Aerith forums.

This is a forum based on Final Fantasy 7, a game released in 1997. Interest in the game had waned, and only a small handful of people posted on this board. Then a sequel was announced, and interest in the game flared up anew, flooding the board with new members and causing a wave of bannings and flame wars. It got so bad that some mods and admins fell from grace and wound up banned. The forum has become much more welcoming in recent days however, as evidenced by the creation of an area for greeting new members and the pleasant posts that grace this area.

Actually the whole oldfag vs newfag thing is a joke as no one at 4chan knows how long the other person has been posting there.
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Clueless Newb Joined: 25 Mar 2008 Posts: 33

Clueless Newb Joined: 01 Feb 2008 Posts: 18

Meh, it's okay if you don't post.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

Clueless Newb Joined: 12 Jun 2008 Posts: 13

/m/ board's safe, too.

What?

Whaaaat? I like robots, okay? If you've got a problem with that, then I gotta say "It's a guy thing you wouldn't understand" which would be ESPECIALLY POIGNANT IF YOU WERE A GUY. How incredibly clever of me to defend myself this way! (/mixed sarcasm)

Anyways, if you hate a board and are particularily good at engineering attention (run a popular DeviantART account, for instance), you can create one of these for an unsuspecting and under-administrated boards yourself for shits.
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What is the meaning of the weaning

Lurker Joined: 16 May 2009 Posts: 3

Yeah this event occurred At Explosm during the now infamous 'rewrite a comic' contest. Thankfully the forum had a spam forum and active mods, plus a beef forum specifically designed for flaming. Between the mods, the royals and the other regular members a healthy 'burn and purge' operation took place and we all lived happily ever after. Well, everyone who mattered, anyway.