Thread vs Forum
Navel gazing thoughts on Gater and Scaper TWoP posting habits, possibly only of interest to aurora_novarum and monkey_pants7
With the lead up to the premiere of the latest Stargate incarnation, SG Universe, there’s been a flurry of activity in that show’s TWoP thread in the Sci-Fi and Action Adventure Shows section. And, just as happened before SG Atlantis came out, there have been pleas to expand from a single show thread into an entire forum. I know that comes up every now and again in the SG1 thread as well. And honestly, I know that I used to be an advocate of it. It makes sense, right? Star Trek has its own forum with a sub-forum for each flavor in the franchise. Several other shows with rabid fanbases - long running and untimely cancellations both - have their own forums instead of “only” having a show thread. So it would be in the interest of fairness to expand for Stargate.
However, I’ve recently changed my mind and have decided that I actually prefer the single thread status for the three Stargate shows. I came to this realization in a rather roundabout fashion: by falling behind in the Great Farscape Rewatch.
You’d think with only one episode to watch a week I would have been able to keep up with the rewatch. But I failed. Miserably. I’d read through the few pages of comments in each episode thread and add mine, sure, but there would rarely be any discussion going on since I was so behind the times. Yet I noticed that as we got further and further into the series, there were fewer and fewer posts discussing anything about each episode at all. For the back half of season four, there were generally three or fewer rewatch posts per episode. And that didn’t really give me any incentive to keep up with my own delayed thoughts so I finally just quit posting altogether.
I am a completist though and I had been meaning to go back and archive my first time viewing posts in back-dated LJ entries. So instead of going through the “We’re So Screwed” threads, I dug up the old solo thread before Farscape got its own forum as a reward for winning all the charity recap auctions. I’ve just finished cross-posting through season 2. And I fell in love with the old thread.
It was so alive! It was so vibrant! There were so many different posters and so much activity and discussion. Now sure, some of that was due to PK Wars being announced and then airing. But it was its own animal long before that and it stayed that way long after it. I miss that. I wish we could go back to that kind of flurry of topics. It had its own ebb and flow and the conversation mutated and warped and came back in on itself. I finally understood what the longtime Stargate posters meant when they argued that a full forum would destroy the community they had. Yes, it’s a daunting format and it’s tough to just jump in. Hell, I still don’t venture into the SG1 thread more than once or twice a year. But I would never want it to go away. It’s a unique beast. I wish the Farscape forum could at least be moved down to the Sci-Fi section. It’s buried up amongst active shows but without active recaps, you’d never know it was there. It doesn’t deserve that kind of suffocation. It should be treated with more dignity.
With the lead up to the premiere of the latest Stargate incarnation, SG Universe, there’s been a flurry of activity in that show’s TWoP thread in the Sci-Fi and Action Adventure Shows section. And, just as happened before SG Atlantis came out, there have been pleas to expand from a single show thread into an entire forum. I know that comes up every now and again in the SG1 thread as well. And honestly, I know that I used to be an advocate of it. It makes sense, right? Star Trek has its own forum with a sub-forum for each flavor in the franchise. Several other shows with rabid fanbases - long running and untimely cancellations both - have their own forums instead of “only” having a show thread. So it would be in the interest of fairness to expand for Stargate.
However, I’ve recently changed my mind and have decided that I actually prefer the single thread status for the three Stargate shows. I came to this realization in a rather roundabout fashion: by falling behind in the Great Farscape Rewatch.
You’d think with only one episode to watch a week I would have been able to keep up with the rewatch. But I failed. Miserably. I’d read through the few pages of comments in each episode thread and add mine, sure, but there would rarely be any discussion going on since I was so behind the times. Yet I noticed that as we got further and further into the series, there were fewer and fewer posts discussing anything about each episode at all. For the back half of season four, there were generally three or fewer rewatch posts per episode. And that didn’t really give me any incentive to keep up with my own delayed thoughts so I finally just quit posting altogether.
I am a completist though and I had been meaning to go back and archive my first time viewing posts in back-dated LJ entries. So instead of going through the “We’re So Screwed” threads, I dug up the old solo thread before Farscape got its own forum as a reward for winning all the charity recap auctions. I’ve just finished cross-posting through season 2. And I fell in love with the old thread.
It was so alive! It was so vibrant! There were so many different posters and so much activity and discussion. Now sure, some of that was due to PK Wars being announced and then airing. But it was its own animal long before that and it stayed that way long after it. I miss that. I wish we could go back to that kind of flurry of topics. It had its own ebb and flow and the conversation mutated and warped and came back in on itself. I finally understood what the longtime Stargate posters meant when they argued that a full forum would destroy the community they had. Yes, it’s a daunting format and it’s tough to just jump in. Hell, I still don’t venture into the SG1 thread more than once or twice a year. But I would never want it to go away. It’s a unique beast. I wish the Farscape forum could at least be moved down to the Sci-Fi section. It’s buried up amongst active shows but without active recaps, you’d never know it was there. It doesn’t deserve that kind of suffocation. It should be treated with more dignity.