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Underground > Policy & Help >

Shouldn't a thread for reviews be started like after something has been released?

Our Lady of The Two Towers

15:46 / 02.09.03

Okay, it happens on the X-Men threads, it used to happen on the Filth threads but now hardly anyone reads it so no-one bothers any more, and in the Film and TV forum there's a thread for The Two Towers Extended Edition started way before it was known what exactly it was going to comprise of.

I can't find it ATM but one of the X-Men threads in the last few months makes it to page 2 before anyone who's actually seen the entire issue says anything, the previous is taken up with maybe a cover and the first few pages from Comicon or The Pulse or somesuchwhere and then people arguing over that glimpse. At the moment we have threads for discussions of X-Men issues that won't be out this side of Christmas (probably

).

Now, I'm not objecting to people getting terribly excited and wanting to discuss stuff based on a teaser post elsewhere, but are threads which are supposed to be about that issue/episode/film in it's entirety necessarily the best place to do it? Shouldn't these sorts of things go in some generic 'X-Men upcoming issues' thread or 'Upcoming films' thread. Or am I just 'bumming out' your 'scene' with my 'bad authority' 'karmic' 'trip' 'maan'?

20:06 / 02.09.03

Does it really cause problems?

01:14 / 03.09.03

Please. You think the comic forum is bad? In the music forum people talk about leaked albums months before they come out. And then ignore them on the release date.

02:01 / 03.09.03

Well, the Two Towers DVD thing had its own thread, and was marked with a spoiler warning.

The thing with FTVT is some people are occasionally lucky enough to get into pre-release screenings of things, and there's frequently vastly different release dates between the US, UK and elsewhere. It's sort of inevitable that threads get started on them [not that WDYLTM?WITPL? is suggesting that they shouldn't be, as (s)he points out] before they're available to all. I may be being defeatist, but in the case of that particular forum, there's not really much that can be done about it. Has it caused a great deal of trouble there, though?

Tryphena Absent

10:55 / 03.09.03

Yeah but there's a difference between listening to a leaked album and reading a snatch of an issue. You can credibly discuss something you've heard in its entirety... or even one song but an issue of a comic book kind of requires that you've read the thing.

Regrettable Juvenilia

11:58 / 03.09.03

Well, Lada, it might be nice if people didn't spend too much time discussing things before they were released. Then again, it might also be nice if no-one ever slagged off a comic or film I liked or praised one I know to be shit... I don't really see any way round this, unless you're seriously suggesting that we should enforce a policy of discussing things only after their official release date, which I think would be ludicrously unpopular, problematic to carry out, and might well finish the Spectacle off.

Matthew Fluxington

12:42 / 03.09.03

As far as the comics forum goes, it may be annoying once the issue comes out, but it seems that a *lot* of people here enjoy talking about the comics before they come out - the speculation is part of the fun. It would make less sense for there to be two separate threads for each issue of New X-Men, so we just bear with having all of the discussion about any given issue lumped into one thread. It keeps things tidy, and on the comics forum, that counts for a LOT. Consider the page of speculation before the discussion of the actual issue a form of spoiler space.

As for the music forum, welcome to the new world, folks. Very few of us seem to interested in talking about the same specific albums here, most of the music discussion on Barbelith tends to be more abstract and about music in more general terms - that doesn't have to be a bad thing. I read and contribute to a lot of music forums, and there are some things that Barbelith does better than anyone else, and that's one of them. If you really want to discuss new releases, ILM may be a better forum for you.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

18:41 / 03.09.03

Yes, but Fly, all your tastes are shit...

I knew that I was moaning about something that was hardly a huge problem on the board, but it's just irritating that people, especially in the comics forum, are all willing to argue about all manner of things about an issue based on how the artist has drawn a character on page 1, or a slight turn of phrase used by Grant on page 3, but by the time the comic gets released there are considerably fewer people willing to talk about the other twenty-odd pages. 1602 is the one exception I can think of, OTTOMH, where the pre-release discussion was in any way matched by people talking about the whole issue.

But then, I don't understand why people go to spoiler sites to find out the storylines of their favourite TV shows and films rather than waiting to be surprised when they see them in their entirety.

17:06 / 15.09.03

Problem Lady: I'm just wondering but do you read the review threads before the comic or movie or album or whatever comes out?

Our Lady of The Two Towers

20:28 / 15.09.03

On the whole I'm reading them after I've read/seen/whatever, but I've just checked the X-Men 146 thread and I get to the end of page 2 and they're discussing the big spoiler in that issue and it hadn't even come out at that point.

But I'm obviously the only person who thinks this is a problem or indeed an issue so I withdraw gracefully.