Monday, July 28, 2008

So you think you can go nuts?

The So You Think You Can Dance forum has always been problematic. It's filled with posters who pine for the fjords previous seasons, posters who fangirl one particular dancer (usually male and geekily attractive) and spin wild conspiracy theories as to why that dancer isn't handily running away with the win, and posters who are self-proclaimed dance experts. I usually feel sorry for the mod who has to deal with that forum because it's a hotbed of overinvested lunacy.

This summer, TWOP Barnes is filling in for the regular SYTYCD mod, TWOP Dietrich, who was smart enough to ditch the job this time around. Barnes is usually a decent mod, if overly earnest and trying too hard to be the posters' BFF as well as disciplinarian, but after last week's results show, in which the forums went insane after the frontrunner Will was eliminated and the TWOP favorite Mark was saved, Barnes gave up sensible modding and decided to join in the insanity herself. She'd previously locked the Mark thread, which is understandable. She also locked the results show thread which, again, made sense.

And then she went right off the rails. She locked all of the threads in the dancers' section, then after some re-tooling made an announcement that all S1 discussion would go in the Nick thread, all S2 in the Benji thread, and all S3 discussion in the Sabra thread. And she also locked a bunch of the choreographers' and judges' threads, ostensibly based on who was permanent and who was just a guest, but the locked and unlocked threads showed no real rhyme or reason. She gave her rationale, such as it was, here.

So, with only two weeks left to go in the season, Barnes decided she just had to totally re-structure the forum, even if the regular mod might revert those changes when he returns, and most of the changes she made were in threads from previous seasons where there has been little activity and certainly none of the craziness and wankiness seen in some of the threads involving the current season. Perhaps I missed it and the Pasha or Heidi or Shane Sparks threads were rife with trolling but I'm reasonably sure she just ate a large plate of batshit sauteed in crazysauce.

To top all this off, Barnes apparently got some bad feedback over her decision. I know, I'm just as shocked as you are. So she created this poll to let the posters express how they feel about the changes. The voting options are a prime example why Barnes often hits my embarrassment squick when interacting with posters. They're the epitome of Trying Too Hard. You can practically see the "Love me? Please?" desperation oozing from her e-pores.

Will she listen to the poll votes and revert her changes? Will she ignore the dissension, keep the changes, and make poor Dietrich deal with it when he returns? Will she have a total break with reality and delete every single thread in the SYTYCD forum in a fit of pique while muttering "Why won't the lambs stop screaming?" over and over? Only time will tell.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

TWoP Barnes ruined the Office forum too. As if Miss Alli wasn't bad enough.

Anonymous said...

TWOP Barnes is humiliating, she's hated by all the unfair bannings she does here and there. She's left a lot of disgruntled ex-members in her wake because of that... and she LOVES it! Why? Because she has some friends in the TWOP site that will always have her back no matter what. So we can safely assume that if she is still in TWOP after one year of having hired this tyranic nobody who just needs a little power to impose herself, then TWOP's has pretty much that same philosophy. Pretty hypocritical of them, don't you think?

Anonymous said...

She's horrible, what's with the unnecessary bannings? They're called NOTES, Barnes, you don't have to go around banning people like a power hungry scab.