There was a good bit of play in the press today about the closure of our developer newsgroups. It was mentioned and heavily commented on at Slashdot (predictably wrong and full of conspiracy theories), C-Net (more tempered and at least somewhat realistic) and Ars Technica (strikingly rational about the usefulness of Usenet). As you can imagine, the public rationale for closing them down is pretty expected, that there's simply not the kind of action that there was 10 years ago compared to the forums on MSDN and TechNet (the app I work on). Most interesting is some of the negative comments on this are the suggestion that typical Web forums suck.
As you might expect, this is a subject I care a lot about, not just at work, but in the communities that I foster, and as someone who has rewritten a forum app about eight times (so far). My first exposure to Usenet came by way of my crappy retail job at a CompUSA right after college. One of the guys I worked with was giddy with excitement to show me where you could get illegal software and porn. About a year into my first "real" job, I discovered the newsgroup rec.roller-coaster, where people interested in the rides would post wildly detailed information about said roller coasters.
I posted on RRC a lot starting in 1998 as I got hooked really quickly. It was also the year I started Guide to The Point (which became PointBuzz). There were two or three people that seemed to derail and disrupt the group in a very loud way, to the extent that the newsreader tools didn't really effectively deal with the problem. The noise started to interfere. I was also very Cedar Point centric then (well, for another year or two), so I added a forum to GTTP in the form of an Ultimate Bulletin Board license. I wrote my own forum app about a year or two later.
UBB was historic in its approach, and I'm honestly kind of sad that it more or less died. It really defined the modern forum user interface, which is to say that it hasn't changed much in ten years. Lots of other free and paid apps have come since, with the de facto standard eventually becoming vBulletin. While the Web-based nature of these forums were certainly a win over newsreaders, particularly since you could keep track of what you had read at work and at home, the biggest win was control.
Usenet was like the wild west. It was very much the ultimate in free speech. It couldn't be moderated or controlled, which is probably why it was so widely used for porn and warez (as the kids used to call it). Then the spammers found it, and the noise level just kept getting higher.
But as the Web forums took over, so began the fight against them. I made it a policy early on to shut down anything that was noise or spam, and in the early years, it meant deleting a lot of crap. Anonymity seemed to encourage racism and stupidity (not to mention homophobia as it pertains to the coaster enthusiast community). I remember having to block those people on a fairly regular basis back then. The great irony is that most would go back to Usenet to complain about our "Nazi" tactics and how it was personal because we disagreed with them. But hey, it kept the noise on Usenet.
Years later we know that most solid forums pretty much take care of themselves, and you rarely have to delete anything unless it's blatant spam. You block people even less. The Internet has become so huge that, unless you're banking a million page views every day, the worst of the worst will probably use other outlets to dispose of their stupidity. The speech isn't any less free in most communities, provided you exercise some basic human respect.
The next wave of Usenet preservation cries came in the early part of the decade, where fragmentation pushed quality community contributors to many, many different places. I remember for some of the dev issues I followed, for example, it was hard to find a really solid place to go with lots of experts. Heck, even Microsoft had several different forums at the time. Our coaster community had a half-dozen very active general interest sites, plus countless niche sites for specific parks or even ride manufacturers. In some ways, it was awesome to watch, because every college kid with a high speed connection was building something. The Usenet defenders had a real point.
But in the last four or five years, massive consolidation took place. Interest in building sites had long since dissipated. The standard UI of a Web-based forum was familiar, even for one that was custom built like mine. Usenet's usable content in most groups continued to go into the crapper. Ultimately, the Web forums became the place for the action. Those who were using Usenet were probably using Google Groups, a Web-based app.
And that gets us to today. The Web forum is just the obvious place for community. What we have seen in the last year or two is variations on how best to use it. If you're a developer, you know and love StackOverflow. It's essentially a forum, only geared and formatted to facilitate questions and answers. Facebook has managed to create a "forum thread" out of virtually everything you put on it. Blogs are even forum-like, in that the first post sparks endless comments. I spend a lot of time wondering what the next variation will look like.
I hope to write a little about what forum apps have meant to me personally and professionally, soon.
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