Wannabe Forums and my Terrible Hate

I hate seeing all these wannabe forums which are obvious rip-offs of others. They assimilate the original forum and then advertise themselves as being so much better. Which generally, they aren't.

As you may discover later in this blog, I am quite a regular user of Mark Overmar's Game Maker, which is a very useful tool when creating games...as you might expect. The main place to go for users of Game Maker is the GMC, or Game Maker Community. This forum provides help with programming, sounds and graphics and is altogether very useful. Sadly, it seems that many are envious of the GMC and those in charge of it. These people then decide to create forums which are exact replicas of the GMC, containing the same boards and sometimes rules. They are then all joined by the same few people who post the same games on there so that every copy-cat forum you go on contains exactly the same games. So they are all identical to each other...and the GMC.

The real problem I put to people who make these forums is "why?". There is absolutely no reason for them to create them. A recent response I received was "why not?". Can you people not understand that that response is not valid?!? It makes no sense. You cannot seriously counter a question with the same question turned around. Not as a valid argument. Never (though someone may later disprove this).

I have a absolute hate of these forums. I mean that. I don't feel like "Oh, well. It's annoying, but what can you do?" because I know that I can do something and that if I keep telling people then maybe, just maybe, they'll get the picture and stop creating the clones.

I am infuriated by two (yes, only two!) other things. The first is that other people don't notice what I am saying. Take, for example, the Lar Game Forums a particular pet peeve of mine. Let us look at their structure and compare it to the GMC's (in brackets) . First, a "News" board ("Announcements"). Then varying degrees of questions and answers (exactly like in the GMC). Next there are "Creation" ("Game Maker Creations"), "Works in Progress" ("Work in Progress"), graphics and sounds "Resources" (Same as GMC) and finally "Whatever" (if you want to talk off topic, go to a forum designed for chatting) and "Your Website" ("Web Site Announcements").

I don't mean to pick on Lar Games particularly but hey, it's convenient. They are in many ways identical to the GMC. There is no point using them. Yet, despite this, they have 617 articles. 617! Many of which are duplicated on the GMC itself.

The final point in my purge is that the owners of the forums fail to notice what they're doing wrong. To use Lar Games again, I posted a topic asking why they had created a clone. It was promptly locked. This is the case wherever I tell people off. They just tell me to piss off or say I'm jealous. Excuse me? I'm jealous? How can that compare to the fact that you have a pixel perfect replica of the GMC?

But anyway, I'm off now. It seems that there are more n00bs creating forums as we speak and I'm off to explain this to them. Bye!

EDIT: See here for an explanation of the Alternative GMC, a forum for Game Maker without the cloning.