AOL Message Boards

They've been gone for 7 months and you just noticed they're missing? Were you hibernating?

I'm afraid life got in the way, leaving not much free time for the boards.  It's a shame they  are gone though!  I didn't post much but enjoyed reading..agreeing with some, disagreeing with some, laughing and learning a bit too.   Thanks for the answer. 

The message boards were the best thing AOL had. Thousands of people used them. There were basically little communities on each board. Then AOL decided that their customers didn't matter so they replaced the message boards with this nonsense so they could sell more ad space. Only problem is most of the "ads" on here are spam posted by dumb foreigners and AOL doesn't get 1 penny of revenue from them, and they don't even seem to care.

Anonymous, I miss the good people posting on the message boards, but overall I don't miss the boards.  The boards that I frequented, we had bullies.  Not trolls but bullies.  Regulars who thought they owned the boards and when they didn't like someone, they would try to bully that person into leaving. They would call people names, insult them, belittle them, and try very hard to make them leave.  ALL because some people were different, or thought differently, or believed in things differently.  I was one of the ones who the bullies tried to chase off, but I stayed strong, and never allowed them to win.  The sad part was that many of the good people left the boards because of all of the nastiness and arguing going on.  We lost MANY good posters because of that.  When AOL did away with the monitors, that when those boards went downhill and were chaotic and hostile so much of the time.  It was a pets message board, but most of the threads weren't about pets, OR, if someone tried to start a thread about pets, it usually got turned into a bashing thread, and then people got disgusted and left.  In the end I had 10 people filtered, but even that didn't really help, because the bullies would just go in and make up a new screen name, and still would post their insults, OR, they would ask their buddies to quote what they had said about me, to make sure I still saw their posts.  The bullies didn't care AT ALL about the good of the board.  All they cared about was bashing and trashing those that they hated.  So I'm glad that the AOL boards are gone, and I haven't missed them at all.  I use FB to keep up with my friends, and the great thing about FB is that the bullies can no longer go on the attack!

Prytania,

I left the boards a long time ago, but came back for a final farewell, right before they closed. So sad :(