I recently went over a couple of threads and took a look at TrekBBS. What's it? I'm not switching, just wanna collect some history.
Star Trek (the old TV show) Bulletin Board Service. I think members there experienced some sort of group psychosis and formed Wordforge. It didn't help.
The TrekBBS was at one time a great site. One of the best discussion wise. I think I'm comfortable saying that aftermath of the 9-11 attacks was when they were at there best. Had posters there in New York City giving updates within sight of the WTC Towers. The equivalent of The Red Room was The Neutral Zone. When I first joined there TNZ was in fact a moderated forum. Eventually they decided not to moderate it and then later to basically only moderate it in preference to their political inclinations there (largely liberal). I was banned from The Neutral Zone in 2005 for pointing out that Hurricane Katrina was not nearly as bad as it could've been death toll wise. I was permanently banned from the entire board in 2009 after criticizing the new Star Trek movie and tell why I thought so many Star Trek fans seemed to like it. At one point, I was told by the moderators there that they were not going to "defend a member they hated (me) by issuing warnings and bans to fellow members they liked".
Lots of Star Trek forums, with some forums about other entertainment genres, and one lame political discussion forum (The Neutral Zone) that doesn't tolerate conservatives. Wordforge was formed by some folks who were disgusted with the way The Neutral Zone was moderated. I still visit TBBS every day to talk Trek, but I stay the hell away from TNZ.
And it was nakedly obvious as hell. From what I've gleaned about TNZ just after was banned, the leftists there were very openly arrogant and smug about having gotten rid of the conservatives and adamant about never letting them come back.
I have an account over there but have only posted something like 20 times. Last I checked I couldn't even post in the off topic area.
Seems like a tragedy. Wordforge was a happy coincidence for me then. I joined here so i could improve my vocabulary and perfect my English. And i love it here. I don't post much but i guess I'm getting over my previous crappy life of depression. BTW learning English is one of the biggest deals of my life.
Wordforge doesn't get new members. You are obviously a dual or about to try and sell me knock off sunglasses.
What's your native language? I've been playing around with Icelandic and Norwegian for the past week, and learning about their culture. Norwegians, for example, live on tacos and Grandiosa frozen pizza.
I got banned for making a roofie joke. My dual got banned for making an appreciative comment about a model/actress in a thread to appreciate said model/actress. To be fair, the comment did provoke a slight shit storm.
Yes, that was a fun night! But we won that battle, since the nerds over there are no longer allowed to post pictures of sexy models/actresses.
That's what was always so pathetic. It's no fun if you eliminate the other side. That entire crew had no stones.
Just out of curiosity for some who may know, and since you seemed to have been there from that time, did trekBBS stretch way back pre WWW and real time internet to a point where it was an actual BBS dial up system like in the late 80's and early 90's? This would have been before AOL hit the real internet, and when BBS systems would download usenet feeds, email, and use things like Kermit and gopher to retrieve files from university and government archives? I know the current definition of BBS has been hijacked by people who know nothing of how it used to be and are working off of current online slang, but since this does have a potential for hitting the old school university and computer geeks who used to communicate on an early internet that was much different than your modern one I was wondering if there were some of the old school geeks from way back then. As for why I was pretty well known back on things like ALF and some of the other alt.* communities right at the peak of their popularity before the flood of morons came in. There was a certain point where things like usenet and IRC were places where the geeks were in power. There was actually a time when the spam and griefer trolls were not so powerful and the university studen usenet and message board systems were the big users, and you also had a number of geeks on popular dial up BBS systems who were getting feeds from the internet and cross sharing their systems with other BBS operators, and sci fi and roleplaying geeks were huge online. There was also an indie music and arts people who were into industrial and electronic music crossharing which a lot were NIN fans who made a presence on places like the old Internet Relay Chat (IRC) which was a very volatile network which had all sorts of splits and real time communication problems which people used to hijack channels and operator status in what were real time net wars for those involved. I just wondered how far back all that actually ran because some of the oldbies may actually have been disgruntled usenet people who went to a more moderated way of doing things. If that ios true you might want to actually respect what some of them say and do as moderators because they have seen things some people here may be very unaware of. They might know the horrors of free speech and really dayton people like you, and me for that matter, are a terrible problem in real free speech areas that are not just spam holes.
Trek BBS actually started as a teletype system in 1965. If you dig back through the old paper archives some of the first messages were: WHAT'S THE FEDERATION AND WHO ARE KLINGONS? FASTER THAN LIGHT TRAVEL IS IMPOSSIBLE. KIRKLANDERSSON AND SPOCK'THALGREIGHTON EAT UP TOO MUCH BANDWIDTH. SHORTEN?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrekNation Started in 1999. Arguably the Neutral Zone dramatically elevated in intensity with the 2000 election controversy
In the old days when the internet was not so segregated lots of people were learning other languages as it helped them in school, but also because you were talking to so many different nationalities online that english only hindered you in getting around. There was a ton of american university students in the blossoming comp sci field, but there was a huge aussie and canadian presence, and if you were up at odd hours european and african educated people were online a lot. It was a cheap easy way to communicate when the bells were raping people for crossing country boundaries and a lot of educated people from countries like africa, china, and the middle east travelled for better college education and business. One of the reasons I feel americans are dumbasses with their head stuck in the mud is because they fear foreign languages so much. I was there with them in high school, but when I hit college and found the raw internet I realized america for all it's importance is actually a small place in the world when you think of the populations that speak other languages. I remember meeting a few chinese women in a NY bar on halloween. This was NY and the people in there were upscale intelligence, and these 5 women dressed as schoolgirls and maids were way out of the range of anyone american in the bar. One of the reasons is because they were escaping china and to do that they had to be international workers and that required worldly knowledge and academic knowledge that is beyond a lot of american doctorate graduates. I do not normally feel stupid talking to people, but those 5 girls were well out of the american league. Not to say there are not worldly americans, but 99 percent could not keep up with them, and anyone knows chines girls are their trash. Hell, even at that bar they were just regarded as sexy by most. English is a good language to learn for the reason you are probably able to cross communicate the best with it, but I am thinking that bubble is going to pop someday because the main influence for it to be that way is growing dumber and less influential by the day due to their right wing ideals that everyone else should try to meet them because they are so great. If I were to guess which language might be the next big one I would say some form of indian dialect. Perhaps chinese, but i think their aversion to allowing their people to prosper into a huge middle class economy will be the downfall of their importance. I think india is presently a sleeper economy with a potential to promote a technical middle class that will be huge and be the next big thing.
So then not so much. in that time frame they would be a part of the invasion of idiots. I guess idiot is bad. I would call them more AOL drama drones. They are the people who think they were the first on the internet when they were really just the masses who came in and ruined it. They were tasty, but much like being drowned in a runaway chinese buffet too much of a good thing is a bad thing.
You seem to have it down pretty well.A person who could speak both hindi and english would have a lot of advantages in the world. If you coupled that with spanish and chinese you would have a great base being able to communicate even in unfamiliar languages.
Oh, and sorry, my terrible typing and grammar must be terrible on you. Don't learn any of that. I write poorly even in my native language. I am well aware of that.
