The Artistic Outlaw

Let’s discuss the current state of the internet, and the relative Internet dinosaur “The Message Board”. Currently, almost every site you visit has one, it’s become the new about page, and the new contact us. It has been like this for quite a while now. I can remember just a few years ago—when I first came on the Internet scene—the message board was not a “site staple” but, in fact a “site extra” and was available only on the busiest, most popular of personal/hobby sites or on business and corporate sites that could afford the fees associated with buying, running and maintaining a web forum. There were only a couple of choices of software worth using, and it all cost green backs, something that for a majority of Internet web masters was in short supply. There were a few free alternatives, but nothing that came close to being as functional or easy to use as their pay-to-use brethren.

Skip ahead a year (or so), and the first real players in the free alternative scene emerge, Ikonboard and phpBB. These two boards changed the face of the internet forever. It was now possible for anyone, anywhere, with any budget to have message boards on their personal web-site no matter how large or small the following, it was possible! And the web exploded—seemingly overnight—with forums growing like stubborn weeds in and around every crack and corner of the Interweb. If you didn’t have a message board on your site it was possible, just maybe, that you’d failed your audience, and would never get them to come back, ever. This was the general opinion and consensus of web users and web-site owners alike.

The times, they were a changing, webmasters started foregoing real solid, original content for the standard message board installation containing; fifty empty forums, fourteen empty sub forums and three active participants. Two of which were the site admin, and the site admin pretending to be another member to promote forum growth and activity. It got real bad. It came to a point were entire websites were constructed just to house a forum; the forum was the web-site. There is/was no other place, no other destination on the site. Only the forum, the forum stood alone.

Today, it’s still the “norm”, it’s still acceptable, building a web-site with only a forum, or built around a forum, letting our visitors generate and create our web-sites content for us. Allowing us to get lazy, take a back seat, and forget we even have a site.

I’m guilty of doing it; I’ve let a forum run my entire site on several occasions. I’m not proud of it and I am making strides to change. One forum I used to visit regularly had an admin/owner that was never there, he had the lowest post count of all, and he was the reason you went there in the first place, or at least that’s the general idea I got from the other long term members. This was all crazy, ridiculous and I never thought I’d see a glimmer of change or hope that it would change, and oh, how I’d hoped and prayed.

But I do, and we will, and the net will once again become exactly the thing it’s destined to become. A place to share, teach and learn.

Explain, Jim? Ah yes, my point.

I would be a raving lunatic to try and predict the Internet’s future. That’s not what I’m trying to do here; I am merely making observations and drawing conclusions based on what I know. Please don’t hold me to this, but here’s how I see things.

The message board is starting to decline in popularity; its use is becoming more and more a cliché. The “big” boards are becoming so bloated with catch phrases and keywords that they’ve become unbearably difficult to use or maintain with out some sort of programming education or at the very least, hours of reading f-ing manuals, if manuals even exist. Lack of unique-ness* support by the developers makes it even more difficult to maintain a real forum. Now I’m not naming names or pointing fingers, no one is to blame (No one, no one, no one ever is to blame**) for this decline, no one is at fault. Things change, change is the one true constant. The web is constantly changing, that’s part of the appeal.

So what’s next, what’s going to replace the message boards? Well I think two things will replace the message board as we know it today. One is blogs, they are becoming more main stream, and acceptable, no longer a nerd journal, but a real business tool. I think we’ll begin to see a return to owner generated original content that is high in quality, not just 3 pages of “lol” “:)” in response to some random word game. Seriously, if you want to talk like that use your IM’s and your e-mails and what have you.

Two; I believe message boards will replace message boards. Not just any message boards, but slimmed down, feature friendly, standards compliant, easy to use, extend and make unique message boards. Boards that have big features, but small feature sets, boards with presentation and structure completely separate, boards with tiny footprints but big hearts. I think we’re already seeing the first generation of this type of board coming up over the hill now. But it may be another six months to a year before we see the big players in this new market coming in and really setting up shop, and dominating the market.

All in all I believe that as a collective community the web is starting to move more towards publishing original content, and allowing visitor reaction and interaction with that content, than depending on the visitors to create and build the content of the site for us. That, my friends will only lead us to oblivion.

I don’t have much more to say on this subject, so if you’ve any thoughts please share them and we can discuss it further.

* Unique-ness is skins or modifications to alter the look and feel of the message board.
** Howard Jones said it best, I feel, in 1986