ptlis wrote:
Okay Jier, as you're a newbie here's a little bit of forum history which I hope will help put this BB's particular subculture into perspective.
Firstly in web terms as a community we're old, downright ancient infact - this BB has been going for over four years straight (with many of it's original members) now and most of us older members were in a similar forum hosted by keen* together too (some for a couple of years I gather, I was a newbie in the keen* forums when the jump was made). Now at the time the keen* forums we're having major reliability problems, to the point where for the most part it was unusable and so kyhm kindly offered to host an unofficial forum, Poe gave it his blessing and the rest is history. Initially there were two forums - The Bulletin Board forum for news related to the BB & the EN forum, these were soon followed by the Unrelated and RP forums (at least, as I recall). Everything else, all the other comics etc were added one by one after these four basic categorys.
The thing you have to understand is that most of the original members joined to discuss Exploitation Now - a comic strip for adults that at least initially was based around in no small part sexual jokes/innuendo and violence in equal measures (not that that's a bad thing, quite the contrary infact). Naturally, because of this the early members were generally perverts who like explosions and random violence, now as a method to try to keep this mood (subconciously I presume) the idea of the initiation came into being - the idea seeming to be that if a newbie can take the frankly asinine description of these acts in good humour then there's a good chance that they'll fit it. Something of a KIBO filter for people if you will.
The problem stems from the fact that EN is long dead now and many new comics have come and gone, all contributing users to the community as a whole such that the dynamic has changed significantly. When we have users who come to discuss comics like the midlands or ES they don't want and should not be subjected to the crass treatment that was acceptable when the forums sole purpose was to discuss EN, but some of the older members are perhaps reluctant to see the last remanents of 'the good old days' dissapear, even if within the contempory community such shenanigans are no longer appropriate.
If kyhm forums ever makes it to wikipedia as an entry (which it almost certainly won't, but anyway) that's the kind of description I want to see for it.