Ship of Fools forums

[EmilyAlexandra]

Since we are all facing the imminent demise of CAF, I just wondered whether anyone else has any experience of the Ship of Fools forums:

Ship of Fools forums

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I’ve checked it out, and I’m in two minds. On the one hand, there seems to be a lot of well-informed and thoughtful discussion on there. On the other hand, I get the impression that it’s all a bit cliquey. It mostly seems to be a small number of people who have been talking there for years, and there are all kinds of jargon that seem almost designed to deter newcomers. For example, people there aren’t supposed to refer to homosexuality or the ordination of women. Instead, they are supposed to say “dead horses”. For example, someone will say, “I used to worship at St John’s, but left the parish over dead horse issues”. They also have a whole section of the forums called “Hell”, and if you disagree with somebody in one of the other forums, you can issue a “Hell call”, meaning you wish to continue the discussion in “Hell”, where different rules apply.

 

[BartholomewB]

I discovered Ship of Fools a few months ago and I’ve posted there a few times. There don’t seem to be any other Catholics there, and on the whole, the questions they discuss are not the kind of questions that Catholics would find interesting.

I see from your profile that you’re not a Catholic, so your perspective would naturally be a bit different from mine.

 

[EmilyAlexandra]

It’s hard to pin down exactly why I sensed that I might not get on with Ship of Fools. I think I identified at least one Catholic on there (before you would have posted anything), but you are right that it seems very much skewed towards Anglicans plus a few Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers and the like. I didn’t think that they were asking pointless questions, and a lot of posters on there seemed pretty well informed and willing to enter into fairly detailed debates. It was just something about the tone. The adjective that comes to mind is “arch”. Also, while I feel that CAF could sometimes be a little excessive in censoring content that was considered unsuitable, Ship of Fools seems to have almost encouraged an atmosphere in which, for example, people use gratuitous bad language or are deliberately rude. I don’t know. I may give it another chance.

 

[WanderingPilgrim]

Byzcath.org has a good forum for people interested in Eastern Catholicism
Fisheaters is a good forum for traditional Catholics (I don’t personally recommend it though as its a bit of an echo chamber and can be highly toxic with a handful of members who are the most active on there)
R/Catholicism, R/EasternCatholic, R/TraditionalCatholics are all good places on Reddit and are all very active
Catholic Common Sense forum on a proboards site is fairly active (could be better, could be worse)

 

[dochawk]

you can issue a “Hell call”, meaning you wish to continue the discussion in “Hell”, where different rules apply.

long ago, pre-internet, usenet had “alt.flame”, where such notions applied. Although folks tended to get told by others to “take it to alt.flame” (and if they didn’t, flaming would commence . . .).

At the time, order was maintained by flaming newbies for inappropriate (sometimes unknowing) behavior.

Then came the eternal september . . .