(no subject)

[bladespark]

Okay... I honestly want some options here.

Does there exsist a place on the net where a person can vent about pet peeves, annoyances, and opinions, WITHOUT starting huge, melodramatic "I'm going to take this personally!" wars? Because honestly, if there is, I really, really, really want to know! Twice in a row now I've had something I wrote forcibly deleted because it caused too much controversy, and I HATE that. Argue with it if you must, disagree with it if you feel so inclined, but DON'T FREAKING CENSOR ME!

Comments

[nsdragon.livejournal.com]

A personal blog, perhaps? You'd be completely in control of what you say and how you say it. There's LJ already for that, but to address a larger audience I'd go with something else.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

I somehow doubt that any personal blog of mine would draw much of an audience. I'd get mostly friends of mine, and probably not even as many as now read my LJ.

[pilias-simber.livejournal.com]

I would you have to do some searching as every message board community is different, but I would like to believe that there are, I have been part of several communities in which you could rant and rave and it might start some discussions or something but nothing was taken personally.

[thetommydodd.livejournal.com]

Depends what you want to do. You only control what you write, not how people react to it. The ONLY way to guarantee that someone doesn't take something the wrong way is to make sure they never see it- old fashioned paper diary, perhaps? I suspect that would defeat the object of ranting, though. Venting your frustrations at an awkward world is pointless if the world isn't listening. (If a tree falls in the forest and no-one hears, who cares?)
I suspect you're up against good old human nature here. When rantage and shoutage occurs IRL, people naturally tense up, get defensive, even aggressive, whether the rant is directed at them or not.

[poncelet.livejournal.com]

Yes, there is a place like this. Or can be. Create your own site with message boards. Aside from the obvious shift of authority to you, there are other advantages. You get to choose what sort of things should be discussed in your message boards. So if you want to have your responses considered advice, post them in the advice forum. :-)

Don't let the infrastructure of a website like this scare you. These days there are Content Management Systems -- PHP programs that generate all the HTML for you. These are free, they are immaculately laid out, and they are actually easier to maintain than a simple website.

I recommend Mambo (http://www.mamboserver.com/) for your CMS. You'd need a site to host it on that has PHP and MySQL support -- you can expect to pay less than $10 per month for that.

Mark

[aurora77]

If you want that kind of environment, create it. If you want your own message board, just ask me. It's easy for me to set up a phpBB forum for you. You can pick a few people you trust to moderate, give them your rules, and let it go. It would only take me a couple of hours. And it would be free. (It would be stuck on my 80sCartoons.net or 80sCartoons.info domain, though. You could stick it in frames on your own site to make it look like it's on your server.)

My forum is running fine without rules other than keeping it family friendly and trading/selling offers legal. There's a small community of regulars and lots of people who just stop by long enough to find what they want. It didn't take much effort on my part. Just a link to it from my site, a few starter threads to get people talking, and a few links posted on other sites. It's low maintenance. If you want to customize the skin and have files for me to upload to do it, I can do that. No problem. I have more than enough disk space and bandwidth to support even a relatively successful forum.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

It is a possability. I've had forums in the past, they never attracted any attention at all, but with the higher traffic on my fursuit site, it might be worthwhile.

Now, however, isn't the best time to start that, since I'll be completely out of touch for a whole month after next week.

Anyhow, I'll talk to you about it later.

[spottibat.livejournal.com]

You could put them behind cuts with "Warning, rant. Please do not flame, I'm just venting." as the title of the cut.

[2dlife.livejournal.com]

I suppose if you just want to vent, I find it best to do it in person to someone who is very patient. If you want to rant to no one in particular, try just ranting it somewhere very private, in a text document on your computer, for example. If you want to rant to an audience, try ranting at craigslist.org or bash.org or any of a bunch of other places where such things are the norm. But if you want to rant TO the person you're angry at and don't want them to take it personally, well, that may not be possible.

[(Anonymous)]

Start an online radio show. It's easy and you don't need to worry about censorship or people not agreeing with your opinion. That's what I did. (:

[taren-fox.livejournal.com]

Woops, forgot to log in. x.x