Whatever Happened To RAME (rec.arts.movies.erotica)?

Jeff, former moderator of RAME and keeper of its famous FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) — a great and early online source of information on porn — writes on ADT:

The old-timers in RAME poo-poo’d a webboard at the time mostly because we we wanted to stay a Usenet group and didn’t want to administer a website of any seriousness. Usenet is pretty much free; bandwidth costs… not to mention running the forum software, etc. Usenet was simple to manage, and at the time, still vital.

As far as discussion and info, bear in mind, ADT is not RAME’s successor in anything beyond a common topic. None of the RAME MODs have any input into anything on ADT. ADT has their own management, ownership, etc. They have their own policies, guidelines, culture and whatnot.

While some posters left RAME and came here, others left RAME and went to XPT. A few others stuck around RAME; others went to specialized Yahoo groups or dedicated message boards.

ADT, to me, is a FAN forum; and as such things are going to be a bit softball. These are people who like talking to the starlets, etc. RAME was less about talking to the starlets than it was airing grievances about the industry.

If you want a forum more inline with airing grievances, check out XPT; they specialize in it. Some people who post here also post there. I’m a member there as well (a lot less active; I mostly lurk).

However, that said, I think there’s some valid criticism and grievance-airing at ADT; it’s just tough to discover without the name-calling it’s sometimes accompanied with.

Tritone posts:

Not only was I a RAME-er, but I was a frequent reader (and sometimes poster) of its precusor, alt.sex.movies. If anyone remembers those days, ASM got overrun by SPAM like so many other USENET ALT.* groups did once the Internet boom happened.

Things have definetly changed since those days. Web forums have largely replaced the USENET as venues for discussion. This was a change for the better, IMHO — adding more features and making it more accessible for "non-techies".

Regarding the attitudes and policies of this board. I have found ADTs philosophy of focusing on the "sanitized" view of the porn industry mostly fits in with what I want out of porn. I know there are controveries, drug addicts, girls who flake, girls who hold their fans in contempt, accidents on the set, etc… But for the most part I don’t want to hear about this. I want to know what girls, directors, movies cater to my specific porn tastes. I like to focus on the fantasy side of porn, not the behind the scenes.

That being said, the one area where I break this mold is my pursuit of truth in why some starlets will or won’t do interracial. In these cases, I have always made my positions clear without resorting to name-calling or nastiness. I might not always get the answers I want, but the moderators have allowed me to ask my questions.

So in the end, I find that you can have hard-hitting discussion here, but you have to be careful how you approach your arguments. You’ve got to be like Mike Wallace or Ed Bradley — pose challenging arguments, but be a gentleman at the same time.

Hardware posts:

Posters here are expected to act no differently than if they were at a party speaking face-to-face with other posters, be they talent, directors or fans. However, unlike a real-world party, you can’t sneak into the bathroom and gossip cattily without everybody else knowing about it. Which is to say – constructive criticism is welcome, being an asshole and picking fights isn’t.

 

In fact, you’ll find a great deal of criticism on this site. What you won’t find is much bashing of people in the industry. Even so, topics like Who are the cum-dodgers? and Jules Jordan: massive drop in quality are allowed. In other words, criticism based on facts is fine, gossip is more likely to be curtailed. That being so, I have to wonder what ‘brutal honesty’ you feel constrained from expressing.