EVIL forums!

(Enter Matt from right, approaches podium and clears throught)

“Hi, I’m Matt, and I’m a forumholic.”

(Applause)

Yup, It’s true. I’m addicted to forums. If I had to take the typical list of items used to check for alcoholism and apply it to forums, there would be no doubt-I would probably answer ‘yes’ to ninety percent of the questions! It’s a really terrible affliction, I find myself wasting ridiculous amounts of time checking threads that I have ‘contributed to’ for responses, and occasionally browsing new topics to add my 2c. I don’t know whether it’s the sense of ‘community’ or a morbid obsession with correcting ‘fanbois’ and other misguided gamers in their skewed knowledge and assumptions regarding gaming and the games industry that draws me back to my regular ‘haunts’ again and again. It’s probably a combination of the two.

The site I waste the most time on (and make no mistake it is wasted time) is www.nag.co.za. Or should that be wasted. The site has recently been revamped, and for some bizarre reason, instead of just changing the look and feel of the site and sticking with the existing technology, the webmaster has (rather misguidedly in my opinion) chosen to use a totally new forum technology. This would be great, except that the new technology seems to have less built in functionality than the previous one, and all the functionality customizations that he made on that technology have now been lost. Of course the flip side of this is that I find it a whole lot easier to resist checking on the forum, now that the (comforting?) familiarity is gone, and the new format is such a pain to use. So in that respect, thank you Mr. Webmaster, you have done me a great justice.

The other sites I occasionally visit have far less traffic and in some cases are far more focused or less interesting, which means there is less of a risk of spending too much time on them. Apparently you need only do something (or not do something) 12 days consecutively to make it habit, so in two weeks I should be ‘clean’. Yay! Now I’ll have more time for blogging :p