CONNECTED: A HISTORY OF THE FTMB
ABRIEF HISTORY OF THE FORTEAN TIMES MESSAGE BOARD
STU NEVILLE looks back at FT’s online forum and how a modest corner of the magazine’s website gave birth to a community that continues to thrive on the eve of its 20th anniversary.
STU NEVILLE looks back at FT’s online forum and how a modest corner of the magazine’s website gave birth to a community that – despite technical challenges, public spats and publisher indifference – continues to thrive on the eve of its 20th anniversary.
Throughout the 1990s, the Fortean Times was riding high. General interest in fortean subjects was still extensive, thanks largely to the success of The X-Files, and there was a sudden proliferation of fledgeling digital offerings. Forteana itself was on the cusp; by the end of the decade, interest in UFOs was dying away and ghosts were coming into vogue once again ( Most Haunted would debut in May 2002) and the world was well-disposed toward the weird. In 2001, the Fortean Times itself was on a cusp of its own: it parted company with John Brown Publishing and joined the IFG (I Feel Good) stable, and around this time it was decided that it should have its own website to mirror the magazine’s content. This had subscription info, copies of articles, a whole section devoted to It Happened to Me (the pick of which made print in the mag itself) and in a small, un-regarded corner, its own message board.
This was still a relatively novel concept. There had long been bulletin boards, squawking over dial-up modems, but they generally had a sparse, tree-like structure (still echoed in Reddit), and half the fun was trying to work out where on Earth the hugely meaningful and insightful gem you’d just posted had gone. The Fortean Times Message Board, however, was powered by vBulletin, had a natty spider motif running through it (the Internet was still “the web” to many in those oh-so distant days) and a clear group of broad categories. Administered by Alistair Strachan and Mark Pilkington, its membership soon
The very first thread, in 2001, was “The Loch Ness Monster”
numbered in the high 10s, with everyone eager to start populating the separate forum sections, each of which was a large, echoing empty warehouse awaiting material. Perhaps unsurprisingly many of the classic cases had an early showing: the very first thread (at least the first still in existence), from 29 June 2001 was The Loch Ness Monster. Who started this one is sadly, if somewhat appropriately, a mystery for reasons I will go into later.
There was a palpable excitement, as people with often as not a lifetime of relatively solitary interest in our corner of the world could suddenly speak with others who shared the same enthusiasm and curiosity: many early threads, tonally, consist of “Ooh! What about X?” with equally excited conversations following. In addition, having found likeminded people (apparently in some cases for the first time ever) the Chat section absolutely blossomed. We had a community on our hands. What was clear from the beginning though – incredibly rare even then among discussion groups – was a baseline of courtesy and tolerance. The vast majority of the early adopters were FT- readers or subscribers who perhaps instinctively understood the kind of balance and respect for alternative viewpoints that we’ve sought to maintain ever since. All baselines have exceptions though, and trolls appeared quite early on, enlivening threads with their helpful comments, occasionally posting people’s home addresses, taking wellintentioned threads where people posted their own pics and photoshopping them into porn scenes, and indulging in other forms of light-hearted merriment. This prompted the Powers That Be to ask for moderators, and they were duly recruited, given a badge and a cutlass and pointed in roughly the right direction – one of them was me. Reaction to this was splendidly fortean. A mixture of welcome, sarcasm, prophecies of doom and outrage. We got the trolls sorted, and then moved our attention to a bigger problem: The Great Midnight Collapse.
Every night, at the stroke of 12, the board would become unusable. The problem was that the software just wasn’t designed to cope with the degree of use: at times we’d have as many as 700 users simultaneously using the board, and given the exponential rate at which content was growing, especially in Chat, when the software attempted to index the database (set for midnight GMT) it would faint. We attempted remedial measures. The most obvious, and most controversial was the decision to prune Chat. At that point, Chat held over 50 per cent of the threads on the board, some with over 1,000 replies, others with one or fewer, from virtual pubs with a
massive and rowdily-good-natured clientele – karaoke a highlight – responding to requests for opinions about supermarket own-brand rhubarb yoghurt. We set the system’s in-built auto-prune (not another yoghurt flavour) to cull anything that hadn’t had a reply in three months.
The effect was severe. Not on the system; while it still slowed to a crawl at midnight, there was no more complete, three-hour outage. No – the effect was on some of the membership. While most accepted the loss of so many threads as necessary, and recognised that Chat content was, and still is, secondary in importance to the rest of the board, some were very attached to the posts they’d produced and conversations in which they’d participated, and there was real anger among some, which hardened into antipathy. In addition, a board upgrade accidentally erased a large number of member details – hence the deletion of long-dormant posters and why whoever it was that started the “Loch Ness Monster” thread is now shown simply as “anonymous” – as well as banning users and forcing people to re-register. Moderators became resented by some, which often spilled over into arguments and accusations, and for a while there was real turmoil, with a high turnover of mods. We dealt with it as best as we could: in retrospect, there are other routes we could – and would – have taken, but at the time we were trying to keep the community together. Many big posters nonetheless left – which is a pity, as it would have been good to see what they could have contributed in the years since. Indeed, the door remains open and they will always be welcomed back.
We rebuilt. By the late noughties our membership had burgeoned to several thousand: the fashion for paranormally themed TV had attracted many newcomers, along with our hardcore of long-term and original posters. The content had burgeoned, too – so much so that sub-division of the original broad categories became necessary, a process greeted, as we’d come to expect, with a mixture of enthusiasm and outrage. We still had problems with software, and as part of an overall reorganisation of the publisher’s sites the forum was given a separate identity from the main site, and with it another upgrade, this time to XenForo software, which was far more cooperative than previous iterations. With this, we could refine our subdivisions.
I’ll take this opportunity to explain why this was necessary. The board had changed from what it was when it started, and change is part of the reason for its longevity. Most other message boards dealing with our sort of content have long since gone: while we were among the first, we have figuratively ridden the waves rather than going against them, or indeed trying to hold them back. When we started, many saw the FTMB’s immediate charm as being like that of a rambling backstreet antiquarian bookshop where like minds could meet: there are vestiges of this, and we have tried very hard to preserve it, but for a long time we’ve been aware that the board is often used as a resource for research and discussion. Whereas the early iterations played heavily into the fortean flaneur instinct, there were many, many threads started on topics that had in fact been under discussion for years (our legendarily inconsistent “search” function has helped no end in that respect.) The subdivision helps those who are new, or who want to pick our collective brains to see what we already know, and often as not to add their own thoughts. So while many of us, me included, do miss the ramble, we now rarely get new threads started on old topics but instead find old favourites suddenly bumped and re-invigorated. It remains a pleasure to go to the end of a forum and find new old material, and even people who know the content backwards will always find something previously overlooked, or conversations long-forgotten.
We ambled along nicely – peace reigned. We had a stable, well-liked and hugely capable moderation team and a board that, the odd domestic aside, rubbed along well. We briefly played host when the Alien Hub message board abruptly closed in spring 2017, and many of its members rallied on the FTMB as a safe haven while they made arrangements to resettle elsewhere – we had 200 new members for a few weeks, before they moved on (though one or two still visit.) Then, in the late summer of 2018, came a shock.
Following another reorganisation at the publisher level, and a drawing-in to core business, the forum was to be closed. What happened next was – and I was in the middle of it – frankly dazzling. Suddenly offers of help and hosting came from multiple angles, members started compiling memberlists and emailing, helping us contact dormant posters, providing a rallying point on Facebook if the board did suddenly vanish. We received dozens of offers of help: the very vitality we’d seen in the early days came rushing back as we all found a common purpose once more. On the back of this rush of goodwill and generosity, we found a home as fitting as the one originally created and hosted by Fortean Times – at the Charles Fort Institute, where now we continue to flourish as The Forteana Forums. I have to give absolute and heartfelt thanks to those without whom this would have been impossible: Gordon Rutter, DeanValentine, Yithian, Enola Gaia and Frideswide, and of course to David Sutton for helping negotiate our stay of execution long enough for us to make our new home with the CFI.
As we tip over into our 20th year, the forum remains as vibrant as it ever was. Here’s to the people who have made it happen: the kind publishers, the kinder benefactors, the team past and present, all of whom have gone above and beyond and without whom it would have been impossible to sustain (believe me, this I know) and above all, to the members who make the Forteana Forums the unique place it is. Like all communities, its fortunes have waxed and waned, there have been friendships and adversities, marriages and divorces, we’ve celebrated births and mourned deaths, welcomed newcomers and left a light – still blinking – for the missing in action and lost at sea. There have been awful losses and priceless gains, but the spirit of pure curiosity is as strong as it was in those first days, as befits a child of Fortean Times. Here’s to the next 20 years!
✒ STU NEVILLE is a lifelong fortean, an administrator of the FTMB since 2002 and an avid pursuer of the peculiar. When not embroiled in the weird he works for a training company.