I quothe the always-eloquent Frank in his best post of all times:
"Over the next few years, I saw two things happen to backtalk which thoroughly dishcouraged me from any continued involvement with the site:
1) The onslaught of the cat-fighting psycho women - The 'psycho fan'!!! Call them perryheads, Augeriheads, journey babes, whatever you want to call them...they are the most ugly cross section of Journey Fan you ever witnessed. Most of these cat-fighting psychos are women in their early 40s to late 50s. They seem absolutely devoid of any reason or well being in their lives. They live to return to Back Talk on a daily basis and fight for some rediculous thing they miss from Journey...be it Steve Perry's short lived mustache circa 1983, Neal Schon's fro, Augeri's red leather pants. Whatever you call it...they treat their 'causes' like an issue that needs to be defended at all costs at the expense of others. Like the causeheads in PCU...these psycho post-menopausal, sexually frustrated, emotionally depressed women brought an absolutely war-like atmosphere to Back Talk. A large percentage of them were the equivalent of an online stalker. The amount requests I received, seemingly on a daily basis, for band member's email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, etc by these stalkers was simply unreal. I didn't have this information to begin with...but I turned away these nutjobs everyday.
I also humbly disagree with Andrew in a small way. I do feel that it is a representative cross section of the band's fan base....as sad as that sounds. It may not be the whole fan base...but no other band has such a violent, mean-spirited online fan base....Go to any other band's forum....You simply wont see the kind of bickering and fighting between women that you see here. This all leads to #2....
2) As a result of the cat-fighting day in and day out....fighting over Perry's choice of boxers or briefs, Augeri's decission to grow his hair long, where Neal took his dry cleaning....the moderators took control of the site. Skylord and I had had enough...we no longer had the energy....not only that, but we both felt that an over-moderated forum can not survive. The excessive moderation at that site was too much for me to watch...and I left. People couldn't express a view out of line of a list of accepted discussion topics without some moderator bitch slapping the offending poster with a warning of bannishment and a deletion of the post. Or just straight bannishment. I'm not going to say that freedom of speech exists or should exist on a private site...but the extent to which speech was limited on Back Talk was simply wrong. I was convinced that the board was going to fizzle and die as a result of the squealching by moderation. In fact, it is a testament to just how disturbingly devoted to the 'psycho fan' is...that this board is still alive and unwell...even though the place is run like a gulag.
It got to the point where I started to see why the band didn't want to have a forum. They probably lived with the Journey-psycho-fan their whole career. The internet only gave these psycho nut jobs another tool with which to attack Neal, Jon, Ross, Deeno and Steve....and they knew what was to come of such a forum.
Prior to working on the journey website, I saw only good in people online. I never thought such nasty, un-friendly, mean spirited behavior could exist in people until I saw Back Talk turn into the festering evil den of hatred that it is today."
