I find online fan sites to be truly strange beasts. I first ventured onto a fan site when the show "Moonlight" debuted on CBS in 2007. I had been a huge fan of the old vampire show, "Forever Knight" and since this sounded like it would have the same story line (which it pretty much did) I gave it a try. I fell absolutely in love with the show and wanted to share my enthusiasm so made my first foray into fan land online.
The fan site I belonged to lasted longer than the show which many fans fought long and hard to save but the adventures of the forum members became even more melodramatic than the show and after a while I was logging in just to find out who would be the next target for the forum trolls.
When TB came on last year I decided to give the forum a try and for most of last season it was fun but as the season came to an end what ensued was a cat fight among several members and several quit in a huff. So, I left it pretty much alone during the off season and returned shortly before the beginning of season two to find that things seemed to be even worse than when I left.
There are still some interesting comments in the threads but people become offended at everything. Book lovers hate the non book lovers; series lovers hate the book lovers and almost everyone hates someone who starts a thread about a topic which the forum mavens feel is inappropriate or repetitive. This latter response seem particularly silly to me as I wonder why they just do not ignore a thread that matches those criteria instead of making nasty comments.
Lastly I find that there appears to be a clique of people who spend a good deal of their working day communicating with certain specific others through this site and via Skype at night. The sheer quantity of their posts which are mostly inside jokes and comments of a sexual nature (nothing wrong with that if it is broad enough so that others get the joke) overloads the threads to the point that if you want to actually read someone posting about the subject of the thread you have to read through a hundred of the afore mentioned insider posts. It is probably for this very reason that most "repetitive" threads are created. People really want to talk about the show or have a question based on the show and get bogged down trying to read thru this stuff on what seems like the obvious thread.
So, if you have taken the time to read my blog entry please feel free to comment or berate on why fan forums seems to devolve into these kinds of problems.