Internet groups, forums, and bulletin boards have been around for ages, and they have a special importance for people considering moving to another country or who want to communicate with like-minded people about their new home. But there can be a down side to them – which will come as no surprise, I’m sure.

I’ve read about various expat forums in Mexico (not to be named) that are really terrible for gossip and flaming. If you don’t know what flaming is it is when some poor chump posts a comment and gets burned to smithereens, sometimes without even knowing what hit him.

For several years anyway, Mazatlan has had two forums. One is a Yahoo group and the other is a kind of portal for Mazatlan information that also has a forum. Over the last nine months or so I have seen both of these groups pretty much lose their collective minds and degenerate into name calling and unpleasantness. I am amazed at the kind of petty stuff people will write in public.

I think one of the problems with these forums is that if you want to, you can be anonymous. Make up a silly online name, use a yahoo, hotmail, or gmail account and no one will know where that venomous post came from! Isn’t this fun?

John over at Viva Veracruz forum had a bit of a challenge with one user when his forum was new but by managing the negative attitude properly he managed to keep his forum from going sour.

One of the things I like about Viva Veracruz is that the forum itself is organized by interest. Food, Around the House, Mexico resources, Speaking Spanish, etc. So if you are interested in a couple of things but not the rest, just go where you like. It also isn’t an email format – you go to the web address when you want to see what’s up and you post from that interface. It is nice because there aren’t a bunch of redundant posts – you can see right away if someone has answered the question.

But there is an option in Mazatlán, and that’s where you’ll find me. Our friend Jennifer has a forum at MeXscape, and it is a good one. The forum is similar to Viva Veracruz (described above) and it is a friendly, helpful place. In the event someone were to write an inflammatory or mean spirited post, I’m sure she would deal with the perpetrator right away. No need to worry about flaming.

I’d love to see people at the two other older forums clean up their acts and play nice. They do manage to do that for a week here and there, but then back it goes to negativity and crankiness. So instead of subjecting myself to reading that kind of thing on a daily basis, I am going to participate in MeXscape and Viva Veracruz, where people are nice to each other!