We have a problem on this message board and it is ruining every single decent thread out there. Our message board is built on the Michigan-MSU rivalry. 90% of our threads relate to the rivalry or one of the schools. That is great.

However, terrordome stuff is out of control. Posts are occuring daily that are directed at individuals. This generally develops into a personal war between posters with the Michigan faithful backing their poster and the MSU fans backing theirs. It turns into one big who can clown the other guy, who has the bigger nuts, who can dig up past contradicting posts, etc.. I am 100% at fault as much as anyone else.

The personal posts need to stop before nobody wants to come to our mb anymore. People that run this site have expressed their distaste for the NCAA board because of non-stop terrordome wars. If you post, ask yourself if the topic of your post matches the topic of the thread OR is another member the topic of your material?

Do not stop the trash talk. Keep bringing the heat. But make the trash talk about the topic, not about other members.

These are not just my feelings, I'm attempting to express the feelings of other mods in one thread after discussing this issue with them. And if I'm not entirely accurate, mods feel free to correct me.

Here's the deal. If you rummage around on the internet you can find all kinds of forums that deal with UM/MSU. Half have no rules and are a low budget online pissing contest. The other half are over-moderated and you can't breathe sideways without getting edited or banned.

For a long time we were right in between, a nice mix of banter with civil behavior and the occasional flame war. Admittedly, flame wars were often between myself and Tre, with a few others chiming in.

Flame wars in this forum tend to peak as hype approaches for football and basketball seasons. No one here is putting blame on any one individual or claiming they haven't participated in the same things that are leading to the problem.

However, much of the recent problematic activity has caused one or more of the following things:
a - forum regulars and well-respected posters have lost interest in the forum because it reads too much like a soap opera
b - the flow of relevant information is interupted to the point of no return
c - threads are running into each other left and right

I'm sure there's more but it's 1:00 AM.

In a perfect world, this is a forum laced with heavy pointed trash talk that can be appreciated by both sides and is kept within the context of the thread topic. It's also a humerous and very informative forum. Many of our regular posters have specific strengths within their posting style that add a great deal to the value of the forum. We do not want to lose that. We would hope our posters can accept reminders like this and pull back some of the unneccessary activity. We much prefer that our posters police themselves, since we loathe forums that are over-moderated. As the mods of the forum, Tre and I have discussed the matter and plan to do our part to be an example of restraint in regards to the activity we've mentioned.

Speaking personally, I'm willing to listen to any suggestions people have in regards to making this forum better. I take pride in the fact that this is the third busiest forum on WTF, trailing only the NBA and Off Topic forums. I welcome such suggestions either in this thread or via PM. A suggestion doesn't guarantee that said idea is implemented, but every idea will be considered as a potential improvement.

I'm sure most of you have recognized this problem to some degree and would also like to see some changes made. We appreciate your efforts and look forward to continuing discussion. Others may be irritated by this thread. To you, I hope you understand the goal of having a healthy forum that is less tangential. (I also hope tangential is a word and means something close to what I'm trying to say)

Well, to be a tad sarcastic, I think I may be approaching 700 words or so (that's probably always going to be an inside joke now - as many things from this forum are) so I'll cut it off for now.

Is 700 a flame thrown at me for not reading em or a flame thrown at X for writing em? I want a throwdown right now in the terrordome if it's directed at me. LOL

Well, im glad a thread like this was made..While I really enjoy the NCAA part of this forum, starting to explore other parts, the constant MSU/Michigan stuff was getting out of hand for me.. While there is nothing wrong with good MSU/Michigan banter, sometimes it takes over a good thread and the thread becomes useless.. That makes me go find other sites with less of what has been going on the last week.. There are good posters for both Michgan and MSU..I tend to know some stuff on recruiting and dont mind sharing what I have heard.

So lets keep it civil... Except for a couple of weeks during the football season and basketball season..

You guys just about said it all.

I've tried to avoid personal insults in my posts, but I'll be honest that I've had a lot of fun going after both Tre's comments and MSU in general, which has led to a degradation of discussion in several instances. So for that I offer a mea culpa.

I'm going to lay off Tre a bit (or other specific posters) in hopes that we can get back to having some quality discussions in this forum again. We've got a lot of people bringing a lot of good info here, but they have a lot of passion for their teams, so things are bound to get somewhat volatile again, as they probably should from time to time. Imagine if we had Pistons and Heat or Pacer fans sharing the same forum.

Personally, I'd love to find the balance between spirited discussion/debate and good natured sarcasm and jokes at each other's (and our school's) expense.

It's not that big of a deal really, just a personal committment by those who care to make this forum more "discussion friendly". Dropping the personal vendettas is a good place to start.

I'm not going all school boy, but a little less vitriol might do the trick. When good posters like Fool and TommyZ start showing displeasure, it's time to take notice.

If you really need to tell somebody to "fuck off", the Terrordome exists for that exact reason.

Fair enough. I admit I have been guilty of letting secondary and tertiary issues drive my posts. From now on I will just take the Thoreau approach (with a twist), (Un)Civil Disobedience.

fuck bukdow

fuck bukdow

This is a great thread, and I find it interesting that the guy who throws more flames out there than anybody started it.
As one who loves to participate in the Flame Wars, I agree with Jick. bukdow has jumped here from the DNews, and brought the vernacular from there just to use this as a platform to spew his personal agenda at Michigan. Now, I have no problem with the concept of a guy who hates UM, but bukdow could take a tip from HipDigIt, who participates there, but brings a new, fresh approach to this forum. He doesn't conjure up old material that he's pirated from other posters there and bring it here in the guise of new material.
I also say, to those who "don't participate": GROW A PAIR! Scroll past the shit you don't like, and post your thoughts. You either have something to say or you don't, and from what I see, most do (even Sparties), and should continue to post.
These things always work themselves out. Tempers flare up, the spears are thrown, and after a time it's back to solid content. This is a great forum, and is mostly self governed.
I agree with Jethro, that alot of forums are so moderated, and complicated by whining posters who cry to those moderators, that if you fart while posting, you'll be banned. This forum is a monument to moderators who don't glorify themselves, and let the posters do what they do, and can take some serious shit. I think that's pretty damn cool.

I also say, to those who "don't participate": GROW A PAIR! Scroll past the shit you don't like, and post your thoughts. You either have something to say or you don't, and from what I see, most do (even Sparties), and should continue to post.


When threads are wasted on crap like this, it makes the site useless..There is a place for it, but not in every thread..

I also say, to those who "don't participate": GROW A PAIR! Scroll past the shit you don't like, and post your thoughts.

Here's the problem I have with that. How do we know we don't like it unless we read it? Hmmm? We have to read a little bit of it just to find out, and by the time we've read that one and the 15 responses to it - all simply to find out we can scroll past in the future - we've forgotten what the once good thread was about and yet another thread went to crap.

Once upon a time there was a mini-terrordome thread in here, which was intended to draw all the over-the-top trash talk into one thread, leaving all the others on topic and readable.

See, the alternative to reading a little bit of a post to realize it's, as you put it, shit, to then scroll past is to use the ignore feature. I've done it before, but then you miss the solid things that poster brings because you've been forced to make a generalization - plus if someone gets sucked into a response and you haven't blocked that person, the whole flow of the thread doesn't make sense to the reader.

It would be far better if our posters were simply mature enough to know when and where to post the "shit". That's a goal I think our regulars are capable of meeting.

As for Jick, I greatly appreciate his efforts to start a flame war in an anti-flame war thread. Perhaps he's fishing for a reason to use his stale MOD POWER post. Sorry Jick, not falling into your trap. Take out your frustrations on a nickel slot in Vegas.

When threads are wasted on crap like this, it makes the site useless..There is a place for it, but not in every thread..

Well, who then, decides what is "crap"? One of the GREAT things about these things is the MSU-UM fan rivalry, and the shit we fans talk to each other. It exists on EVERY forum I've ever read.
Having said that, I do like the approcah that the shit slinging can still pertain to the thread itself, but geezus, nobody seems to be able to define what that means.

Well, who then, decides what is "crap"? One of the GREAT things about these things is the MSU-UM fan rivalry, and the shit we fans talk to each other. It exists on EVERY forum I've ever read.
Having said that, I do like the approcah that the shit slinging can still pertain to the thread itself, but geezus, nobody seems to be able to define what that means.

When it happens in every thread its out of hand..

I don't mind the shit slinging. It just seems like it all blends together and has nothing to do with the thread.

Tre peed in my cherios 3 years ago, so I'm going to bring it up in every thread that he ever posts in.

That type of shit.

When it happens in every thread its out of hand..

Ok, I can see your point, and we'll see how it plays out. I respectfully disagree with the premise, cuz I think this UM-MSU fan war is alot of fun, and it underlies just about every conversation between us all.

haha...it was obviously a joke. thanks for worrying though...and personally attacking as well.

This is a great thread, and I find it interesting that the guy who throws more flames out there than anybody started it.


You're full of it and if you go back through threads, I don't start the personal shit. I admitted that I take part in wars and said I would change, however I never start a personal war, just defend myself when I'm individually called out (MUCH LIKE I'M DOING RIGHT NOW). There have been a few here that always choose to post about me, not the topic of the thread and that's when I spit back. Your post is a perfect example of how threads get derailed. We are on a topic and you decide you want to call somebody out. It's middle school shit, its old, everybody is sick of it, and it's ruining our mb.

You can't possibly be that delusional, Tre, to insinuate that you just respond when called out. I think anybody who reads this forum will see the above post and come to the conclusion that you are full of shit.
Having said that, I'm all for the premise of this thread; like I said, we'll see how it plays out.

Prove me wrong. Go back through threads when I'm battling with somebody. Go to the beginning. See if I'm the one that starts the personal war. I bet you'll be looking for quite some time. I bring heat, and it happens to generally be Spartan heat. Therefore many of the Wolverine fans don't like it and they come at me. It ends up being member vs. member instead of debating a topic. If you think I jump into threads and start attacking members and it is off topic, then you don't read my stuff. Never claimed to stay on topic, but I'm not the one that posts the initial post aimed at an individual. An example would be Tre vs. Glenn. Glenn admittedly has jumped into a thread and thrown out jokes directed at me, then I go off and its war time again.

It's all irrelavent (sp?) though. It doesn't matter if I was the #1 flame poster here, we are attempting to make changes and I'm on board. I could easily claim that you derail more threads than anyone and probably get around 95% backing on that, but I didn't "call you out" in my original post. We are just trying to make changes.