I'm one of those addicts that checks both forums. But, honestly, I wouldn't have bothered with this one if it wasn't due to being repeatedly banned from MaxFisch for no obvious reason. At that time, there were others being banned, discussion about it, and other ways in which MaxFisch was deteriorating, and some attempts (including establishing this board) to provide a better-managed alternative in the hopes that everyone would move there and abandon Max. But forums don't work that way.

Every forum has its usses and thems. There are those who are active participants and find things to discuss in mostly a civilized manner. The thems just use the forum for research - they expect there to be experts there who can answer their most off-the-wall questions. When their question is answered (or not) they go away - not necessarily mad, but they don't really have anything to say.



The search on Max Fisch works fine, but you need to understand how to talk to it. If you put "Mistress Ayn" in quotes in the simple search box on Max, you'll find 10 pages of messages, all of which have your name in them somewhere - some you post, some replies to you, some recommendations that people book a session to you. It's a pretty standard compuer search convention to surround a phrase in quotes to search for the phrase rather than any of the individual words.

And if you go to the Advanced Search you can specify where in a post to look for the searched text, you can search for posts for a user name, and you can set a date range within which to search so if you know you're looking for a post from the past month, you don't have to see a six year old post that contains the phrase you're searching for.

The difference between the search on Max and here is that here, it opens with the advanced options. You can get the same search and the same effective results over there with a click.



That paste thing is indeed quirky, but it's not something a moderator can fix. Best thing so far is Soapy's explanation of a procedure that works, at least for text saved from certain text editors. But it doesn't work for every word processor on every computer or phone. Perhaps this is fixed in with a software update, but updating forum software isn't trivial and it always upsets the users.

I frequently edit posts and I've never lost one that way. In fact I just edited this one. I wonder what's different for you. Adding a picture to a post is more complicated than it should be, but maybe this is a good thing. If it was easy, think of all the red butts and hairy balls we'd see here.


And perhaps the difficulty with successfully posting a pasted-in message is a blessing, too. It makes it more difficult for a spammer who has obtained a log-in here to fill up the form with canned irrelevant text. But some of them seem to be successful anyway.



Well, the reason why I came here was that I was banned on MaxFisch, not once, but several times. Somebody must be a moderator. Not the kind I'd like, but obviously someone's doing something.

Banning or deleting messages isn't always the right way to handle "problem" posts. Deleting a post that someone considers a troll or flame nearly always prompts a comment about freedom of speech. What would be a good thing would be if a moderator could move a post from where it was posted to a more appropriate section of the board. When I ran a BBS 30 years ago, I used to do that all the time, and leave a private message to the poster telling him where his message went. But that was on PCBoard software that I had on the computer right in my house. It may not be so easy when the forum is actually a computer that isn't local.

I'm very tolerant when reading forums. I can easily ignore spam and not get upset that it's there. I can ignore flame wars. I do tend to defend myself if some starts a fight with me, but that doesn't happen very often. I've learned some useful things from MaxFisch and have met a number of interesting people, some still on-line-only friends, some in person. I don't see myself abandoning it any time soon - unless I get banned again and can't find someone to un-ban me.