I have to warn you at the beginning of this post, that I may in fact be going through some sort of a digital midlife crisis. I am not exactly sure how I have ended up here, but over the last few weeks I have found myself missing the “forum age” of the internet. For those who did not cut your teeth in that era, it seemed like every group and community had some sort of forum as their primary internet presence. I am not exactly sure what my first forum was, but I can recall being part of one for every major guild that I was in starting with Everquest. It was often times the core social hub of the group and where all of the plans got made.
The forum that I remember practically living on however was the Argent Dawn US Server forums. So many of the people that I still hang out with to this day came from interactions with this site, and the IRC server that eventually sprung up connected to it. Ynubet my horde side guild leader was a good natured forum troll, and to be honest I probably could have been described in that manner as well. Whatever the case this era is what ultimately lead me to start blogging. I was pretty prolific in posting long winded threads that dissected an issue and tried to sway individuals to my point of view. At some point I realized that effort would probably better spent in a blog post rather than as yet another forum rat.
As new technologies arrived, we tried to adapt that same sort of function to other tools. Slack was the first thing that I can recall trying to make work as a viable forum replacement. For the most part it does, except for the fact that no one actually pays money for their guild slack. That means you are limited to 10,000 comments and as a result you are constantly losing any semblance of history. In my experience this seems to be responsible for the feeling that you are having the same conversation over and over, since there is no consistent thread that you can return to when you want to add fresh thoughts to it.
Discord came along as well, and it has more or less been widely adopted because it is “free” and as a result doesn’t have the issue of constantly losing your history. The challenge with both of these however is there is a sense of immediacy to conversations. Yes you can rattle on about something at length, but it is often times miserable to come in hours or days later and have to perform thread necromancy in order to interject your thoughts into an existing conversation. The organization is also very rough for anything other than random live chat, and the fact that it is so easy to spawn one… means that as I have talked about before we are dealing with a deluge of them available for us to join.
I am as guilty as anyone, in that I kept looking for something better than the forum. I got wrapped up in twitter and google+ and what seems like a myriad of other things all the while not quite understanding what I had lost in the process. There was a specific niche that forums filled, of providing asynchronous communication on topics that could carry out over a number of days rather than a number of minutes or at most hours. During the forum era we used to crave that immediate communication that we have everywhere, but now that we have it… I find myself longing for a slower pace. This is probably just me getting old, but yesterday I followed this madness and created a forum attached to this blog.
It is live and effectively “open for business”. I researched a few options but ended up falling back on the technology that we used to use back in the day for that old school feel. You can reach the forum through a new “Chat” menu, where I have also included the Blaugust and Bel Stream Time discord… even though the later rarely gets used because I don’t really stream much anymore. This might be a horrible idea and it might be the case that no one else feels nostalgic about this era of the internet. The alternative however is one I am willing to take a risk on, that folks miss this sort of interaction and are just needing a place to have it. I spent about two hours last night cobbling this all together, and I am sure there will be changes as we go. However for now I am throwing this project to you my readers to see if you have any interest in it.
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