I made a real point about a dishonest poster, and someone thought is was necessary to attempt to censor me.

Well, when he claimed that "taking someone's education away and forcing them to be blue collar" when preventing student from getting student loans, I have to say I was insulted.

And rightly so I think. My education involved no student loans. I suspect there is a significant amount of the audience that is in the same boat.

So, again, when I saw him claiming something that many of the readers know to be false, and then to see it so highly moderated when his central point is just wrong, I was again insulted.

So, I spoke, and apparently, someone thought it was a "troll". Well, my point was valid, so that's not it. Was it the language?

Well, adults speak here. Sometimes, when confronting others who are engaging in dishonesty, we say things with sharp points on them. Modding someone down for that is a misuse of your points and you should be ashamed.

In short, I said something that is 100% correct, in a tone that expressed my appropriate distaste for a case of misrepresentation, and you felt it was necessary to, what, punish me? Pretend you're my mom and chastise me for naughty language?

HOW DARE YOU?

There's a REAL point here, that your ham handed moderation ignores.

MANY MANY COLLEGE GRADUATES HAVE NEVER HAD A STUDENT LOAN, AND IT IS NEITHER IMPOSSIBLE NOR PARTICULARLY DIFFICULT TO BE ONE OF SAID GRAUDATES.

Which OP presumes is not possible when he incorrectly claims "taking someone's education away and forcing them to be blue collar" is the result of not having student loans.

He was wrong.

And so was your moderation, and your attempt to censor me.

This is not a new slogan. "Join the 21st century" seems somewhat orthogonal to "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I wrote this a year ago, based on much older posts and e-mail:
Why I don't like forums

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Tracking

1. Tracking all the user-ids and passwords for all the various forums is a pain.
2. Many folks use a separate e-mail alias for each forum, so they know when one starts spamming, adding Yet Another bit of bit of data to track.
3. Many forums require or encourage the collection and distribution of additional data: birth date, location, Instant Messaging handles, web sites, etc. Some of this may be required to authenticate when you try to recover a password or otherwise get the attention of the administrators. It's Yet Even More data to track and update, in addition to any privacy concerns.

Display

1. The layout of each forum is completely different. You have to figure out or recall Yet Another scheme before you can figure out what is going on.
2. Most forums are laid out badly. None of them offers much real customization for end-users. Were it up to me, I'd be able to make every damned one of them look exactly the same when I visited.
3. Many forums use a layout or style that is pretty much illegible:
   • Tiny type.
   • Low contrast text. I'm not sure which is worse, gray on black or lime green on black. No, the worst was deep green on burgundy.
   • Many forums give way too much emphasis to avatars, signatures, animations, etc. It can actually be hard to find the posts sometimes.
   • Rigid layouts that make it impossible to resize the screen or browser and see more of the actual posts.

Delivery, Attention

1. Posts to a mailing list sit on my machine waiting for me. I don't have to remember to visit a forum or find some way to track multiple forums.
2. Posts from e-mail lists arrive asynchronously and are already delivered, filtered, and sorted by the time I want to read them. With a forum, I have to go get each post or page of posts from each forum I might choose to visit, and they have to be loaded at that time.
3. Posts that arrive in e-mail can be filtered or organized according to my criteria. Forum posts are organized by the admins and posters into "boards," "sub-boards," and "threads" that are frequently named oddly or just make no sense.
4. Many forums use some sort of "newness" filter and try to keep track of what is "new" for you -- and do so badly. The user interface to control this feature (if the feature exists, if the user interface exists) range from bad to worse.
5. Forums show quite a bit of extraneous information. Showing the poster's handle makes sense, but each post also shows: their avatar, the date they joined, their location, title, "status," role, post count, IM handles, login status, and so on. It shows this for EVERY poster in the thread. Then there is the information for EVERY thread: number of views, number of replies, rating, activity level, various status flags, original poster, last poster, time stamp, number of pages of posts, a page list, and so on. Then the information about EVERY post: reply number, a reply-and-quote button, reply button, report button, site tools and links. At the bottom is also the actual time it took to create the page, standards compliance, etc., etc... Where was the content again?
6. Following discussions in forums requires much more attention than in e-mail.
   Let me state this again: Reading posts on forums is much, much more work than reading posts from mailing lists.

   I am on numerous high and low volume mailing lists. The incoming posts are tagged and filtered into various mailboxes as messages are delivered. At some point during the day, I'll decide to "glance over" these mailboxes. I may have already filtered and marked certain posts with tags like "interesting" or "defer" based on the author or content and can tell in seconds if a spate of posts might be interesting to me.

   Compare that to the amount of time it might take me to visit one forum. I have to:

   1. Remember the URL of a forum,
   2. navigate to the right page to log in (this can take longer if the web site requires or necessitates I visit some other page(s) and navigate to the forum from there),
   3. find my credentials,
   4. actually log-in (I wish I could say this was always easy),
   5. remember, look up, or figure out which method this forum uses to indicate new activity,
   6. figure out which "boards," "sub-boards," and/or "threads" I might be interested in; which might have new postings; and which postings might be by people I care to read.
   7. load the page (and avatars, and smileys, and animations, and signatures, and sounds, and music, and Flash, and JavaScript, and page images, and ads -- every time),
   8. and finally, find the new posts, which may or may not be indicated in some way.

No, RSS feeds and such really don't help. Most of the "feed readers" I've seen are terrible. There is little or no ability to sort or analyze the items that show up and the interfaces are primitive, at best.

Posting, Responding, Searching

1. Every forum has some sort of web-based editor for adding new posts or responding to existing posts. Each of them is different and 99% of them are awful. None of them allow me to use *my* writing tools.
2. Yes, you can edit the post in whatever editor you choose and paste it in, but that's just another layer you must work through to post a new message.
3. Many forums have no facility or do not allow users to "preview" posts, or make it too easy to accidentally post something that is not quite ready. The mechanisms for doing this is different on each forum.
4. Many forums do not allow users to edit or delete posts. The mechanisms for doing this is different on each forum, and frequently the mechanism for editing/deleting a post is different as well.
5. Each forum has its own version of not-really-HTML, a sub-set of allowed HTML and/or CSS, or worse--a mix of several. Which forum am I on again? Coupled with a limited or nonexistent ability to edit or delete posts, it's a nightmare.
6. Forum post quoting mechanisms are uniformly terrible. Many don't reliably refer to the quoted post or author in some reasonable fashion.
7. Discussion threading models are, again, different for each forum, poorly implemented, and frequently just not used.
8. The search tools on most forums (if they exist at all) are simply execrable. Again, each search mechanism is completely different. The regular expressions or "wildcards" allowed (if any) are different, work differently, or just don't work, and there is usually no way to tell if they've failed or how they've failed.

Persistence, Archive, Data Retention

1. E-mail comes to my inbox and I can archive or delete what I wish. Posts to a forum and the archive are strictly under the control of the administration. Anything they choose to limit access to or remove is at their whim. (For example, please note the original message this article expands on was posted to a mailing list in early 2006, and I dug it out of my archive.)
2. Relying on a forum as an archive of posts is unreliable.
   • The admins may lose the domain name, hosting, the server, etc. and a forum can disappear for any number of reasons, including the admins simply losing interest or other "real life" concerns--with little or no warning.
   • Many forums purge old threads and posts on a completely idiosyncratic schedule, and delete items with little or no warning.
3. It's hard to archive messages posted to a forum. You end up:
   • Saving whole pages of posts (some you want, some you don't, perhaps in multiple pages) in HTML format, with images and so on, which may or may not work stand-alone in your browser
   • Editing the HTML pages you saved so just "the good stuff" is saved and visible, which is a TON of work
   • Using a simple copy-and-paste on the text, which loses any of the links and images you might have wanted to keep--which leads to extracting the links and adding them to the text, which is a ton of work.

   Then you have to figure out where to keep the files and how to organize them. If this was e-mail, none of this would be necessary.

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Have I missed anything important? Has the state of affairs really improved much? Forums are better...how?

How about the San Jose public library? They say they've got several:
Sinister Forces : A Grimoire Of American Political Witchcraft / Peter Levenda

No idea if the book is any good, but sprinkling a bit a "ZOMG! Suppressed information!" won't make it better.