Apologies for carrying this on but if I may...
I agree with you about the board should be primary on SEGA with Nintendo discussion being a mere discussion point.
I don't get why you can't say if you don't like a console or a company (I don't hate any company personally...just decisions of x company when they do something stupid)....but I guess the internet is serious business.
I wish people were friendly online as well as IRL...some of the trolls and nasty message from anon members wouldn't dare say this to your face....most likely because they don't have any muscle or fight in them...the rules should apply here too (not SEGAbits, I mean the internet in general). You say something really messed up or bad? IP ban...unfortunately some sites don't ban the bad eggs or worse yet...they take part in the trolling due to being chums with those bad eggs...
Anyway, glad to not see that as much here and you can express yourself how you wish!
I just needed to say this, I'm glad I see more open minds here who not only love Sega and Sega games and hardware, but still have an open mind and not afraid to admit owning a Wii or other object or subject that's easy to hate on or bring up a complete flame war.
I quit posting on IGN being a member (and regular) there since 2001 mainly for the reasons you describe. The mods were rather abusive in some areas while completely slacking in another (sometimes fueling the fire too) and I simply grew tired of it there with the bloated board code which was slow and clunky.
They finally did overhaul the message boards, but the tightly knit communities left due to a insane number of ads (even after paying a yearly subscription to remove them) and a huge waste of screen space.
What game news and reviews that were exclusive to paid members (including posting permissions on many forums) wasn't worth it any longer. What forums I did visit eventually became ghost towns or were deleted.
Made me rather sad as it was a way to keep busy on a boring day or I'd discuss in game help topics which Metroid Prime was a popular spot. The black eye of the entire community was the Gamecube General Board. Nothing but system wars and far fetched hopefor the Gamecube faithful who decided that was the only console they wanted. The other was the free access board known as "Teh Vestibule" (autocorrect gave me a real fight on that).
I hope that this place never becomes that awful nightmare.
