IcePrincess and Sage's Personal Convo Corner

This thread. THIS GODDAMN THREAD. This thread has been my biggest regret in IGNO history, because I am the one who started it. Granted...I started it for a good reason.

In 2006, Sage and IcePrincess were carrying out lengthy, multi-page one-sided conversations on nearly every thread on the board. By 'one-sided conversations', what I mean is Sage posts, then IP replies, then Sage replies, then IP replies, then Sage replies again, and then IP replies again...for pages. Often with nothing but a few words. It was the sort of thing that should have been taken to an IM chat and not a message board, because naturally this made it difficult for other people to enter the discussion - it's like when you see two people chatting IRL. Maybe you want to go say hi to one of them, or maybe you overhear it and they're talking about something that interests you. But how do you just...butt into their chat? It feels personal. It's awkward, even if they know you. So you just walk away and think, 'okay, I'll catch them later.' ONLY LATER NEVER COMES BECAUSE WHEREVER YOU GO, THOSE TWO PEOPLE ARE THERE WHEN YOU TURN AROUND, CARRYING OUT A PERSONAL CONVERSATION. That was IGNO for much of 2006, and to try and 'solve' the problem, I created this thread - a place for the two of them (and anyone else who felt like 'butting in') to chat, keep it to that thread, and let the rest of the board continue normally. And to my credit, it did mostly work. Their one-sided discussions in other threads became rare incidents.

The problem was that this is officially the record-breaking thread of IGNO. It had the most posts (and thus, the most pages), it skyrocketed Sage, IcePrincess and Die_Romantic to top 3 posters on the forum despite their decidedly limited contribution of any worthwhile content, and it was obnoxious to see it as the most recently-posted in thread bumped to the top from the board index all the time. When I finally created the Ghost Town section, I decided to move the thread there (pinned) - posting in Ghost Town, I decided, would not increase your post count, so at least this could cut that problem off, though it wouldn't undo the existing damage. This thread also came too late - the one-sided conversations everywhere had already driven a lot of members from the board because it had gotten 'too random'. My caving and making this thread, to me at least, just cemented the fact that IGNO was dying and basically had no point anymore. I remember that summer vividly...dial-up internet, the computer on the living room floor for lack of a decent place to put it at that time (I needed a desk that could fit that fucking gigantic CRT monitor...yes, I am still talking about 2006), it being the summer between my high school graduation and starting college in the fall, which terrified me...it was a lonely, boring summer. And IGNO wasn't even entertaining because this thread, or the cause that spawned it at least, had driven away the most interesting people. This thread came to symbolize what it seemed at the time was the downfall of IGNO because of what it had become. No doubt if you've read the threads from 2005, you...probably don't see why that was significant, but dammit, to us it was!! IGNO was our cozy little community to chat and maybe be a bit silly, but the chaos was taken too far.

As of this writing, in 2012...Sage (now FallenAngel) still holds the 10th spot in the top 10 posters for IGNO. Mind you, this is after several spam penalizations where I reduced his post count by about 100 each time (so I maybe knocked off about 300-400 from his total post count). The vast majority of this came as a result of this thread.

Some additional statistics - here are all the members who posted in this thread, and how many times.

• Sage [2,083]
• Iceprincess [1,878]
• Die_Romantic [ 947]
• SG2 [481]
• Angel [345]
• Mr. Bland [18]
• )v(ajin [11]
• Dragosun [5]
• Corey [3]
• Truten [2]
• Cumtastic [2]
• ville [1]
• Nandoman89 [1]
• Katie [1]

I think it says a lot if even Corey and Cumtastic didn't touch the thread.

The only reason I'm even putting this thread up is for the sake of keeping records. Invision IGNO has become an archive not easily accessible to outsiders, and I reference this thread often enough as an example against one-sided conversations that it would be good to have an easier way to link to it. Normally, I try to make these transcripts pretty and easy to read - color-coding, removing linebreaks and quotes unless necessary, fixing broken links/images...fuck that shit. I'm going to view the 'printable' version and copy/paste the source HTML (though I am going to run a find-and-replace to change the screennames to the way they're referenced elsewhere on this site so I guess I may as well add <span> colors while I'm at it). All 387 pages - not that I think anyone in their right mind would bother subjecting themselves to this, but hey, knock yourselves out would you believe it won't even let me see all the posts in this format? It takes me to June 7th, 2006 (end of page 20; I checked), and stops... Well, whatever. I went to 'split posts' from my moderator controls and it gave me a view of all the posts in the thread, so I grabbed the source from there. Don't mind the 'move this post' checkboxes, I'm far too lazy to format this better. Wow, WordPress really doesn't want me to post this, so fuck it all, I'm just gonna link to an external upload of the HTML file. Either way, just skimming this should be more than enough to help you understand why one-sided conversations have become an enforced rule on IGNO, and why I'm such a bitch about them.

Click to read the horror.