I asked over in BOTF, why is it called Best of the Fray? I got some kind of coded message, not making sense to me reply from Iso. The posters just rehash over & over, all kinds of presidential hopeful bashing, lots of insulting other posters, down right assinine posts, topics & opinions. I see no difference there then the other Slate Frays.

Why Best of the Fray & what/who exactly are they trying to claim the best is?

Perhaps what Iso was trying to say is that it's not. Maybe it's just a running joke now and the people there stay because it's a habit for them now.

Maybe it's not "best" in terms of superior argumentation, but instead is the archetypal Fray...the Platonic Ideal of the Fray...the Fray distilled into its purest form. Which, in the end, is not all that awe-inspiring. But if you consider the Fray in general, what characterizes it, what qualities and arguments and personalities best represent it...is BotF not "best" at it?

As for myself, I haven't checked it out because I thought the name was condescending. :) Joke's on me.

Granted, I haven't been in all the frays, but BOTF seems to be rather mindless & redundant. Out of all the frays I do visit, it seems to me that FB has the best conversations & discussions & well written posters. FB does get mindless & redundant at times, but not as bad as BOTF & BB. DP is almost always mindless, but it is fun mindlessness.

I guess I had higher expectations of BOTF then I should have.

It seems to be a place for old-timers to celebrate their seniority as Fraysters. I have tried to browse BOTF occasionally, only to find a bevy of insider jokes and guessing games to determine to whom a new sock-puppet actually belongs.

There are some good writers there, and they sometimes offer up little gems. My guess is that many of them lament their choice to pursue other careers while they would have preferred to be professional writers.

I think it used to be much better, and there are still some very talented posters who hang out there, but it has pretty much turned into a big circle jerk these days.

...are self-appointed highbrows who are used to having a little club of very arch, sophisticated, clever people to bounce their comments off of.

From what I've seen, they're pissed that 'commoners' have come in from off-board and started posting about politics and other 'common' material.

For shame! :)

BOTF was orginally what Fraywatch is now. The editor (whoever that was--it might have been Moira) would write an article linking to good posts, and BOTF was the forum for that article. It grew into a community such that the powers that be decided to move to a new spot--Fraywatch. But the "Best" in BOTF doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the forum, and that's kind of what Iso was joking about. By the way, the "everything was better in the old days" schtick is kind of an inside joke there, and, yes, there are a lot of other inside jokes.

I've been going over there a long time. There are (or were) some brilliant posters there--even the nutjobs over there are interesting.

…to what Arch said that back in the days of starred posters, an inordinate number of star posters did a lot of posting on that board. I use to call it starland. I'd estimate probably fifty to seventy-five percent of the top posts were from star posters. Now if you agreed that star posters were some of the better if not the best posters on the fray, then you could imagine why they all might tend towards posting on a board that billed itself as having the best the fray had to offer, even if that wasn’t the intent. Funny how that worked out though, tells you something about the human nature of the star posters, eh?

G