[sorabji]

Some years ago I bought an expensive perpetual license for this message board/BBS software. I bought it expecting to use it for a commercial type of venture but that has never come to pass. It's been sitting on the file-system shelf for years, and I guess the money I spent on this was so far wasted. I plugged it in to the public Internet to see who finds it and what use it might serve for my hobbies, your hobbies, and mutual distractions. I am not in love with this software. The admin screens are a blinding maze of checkboxes, radio buttons, and arbitrary-seeming choices; and the front-end does not lack for clutterful intrusions. My BBS preferences are toward terminal-emulators and command-line interfaces, but those worlds are largely vacant now.

I always loathed comment boards on news and personal web sites -- not BBSes and message boards such as this but those seemingly obligatory "Add your comment" boxes whose litter follows every single piece of content on the web. I considered them a wasteland of callow backwash and asinine amusement for the participators. The drive-by nature of these boards further weakens their merits and is, I think, symptomatic of the Internet-induced fetish for the new. Comment boards rarely inspire interaction or discussion among the commenters who mostly just drop their load of text and move on to the next piece of content (why is spell-check telling me "commenters" is not a word?). I stayed away from implementing comment boards myself for these reasons but also because of technical and management issues that exceeded the capabilities of this one-man-shop.

Lately I have taken a shine to them, though. I think my reconsideration of those boards started when an acquaintance described his fascination with them. His attraction to them was based on all the same things that repelled me.

I am just going to ramble stream-of-conscious-like here. Breaking in a new board is a strange feeling, esp when only I know this forum exists. To be honest I prefer it this way: I prefer knowing that no one can hear me, that no one knows I am hear. I imagine myself invisible.

My purpose here is to ramble, set the preferences for this place, and let it set sail into randomness. This could be anything, it could be nothing, it could be everything within its own frame of references.

I rarely leave comments on other peoples' web sites. It seems most authors usually just ignore all comments -- and that assumes they are even aware the comments exist. I also have an innate bias against contributing to comment and message boards on the grounds that it amounts to giving content to others. I laugh when I see commercial news networks pleading with their audiences to send them content.

Some of what I thought were very well thought-out comments were never "approved" by moderators. This happened in cases where I responded to unkind or misguided stories written about me or about my web projects, but it also happens when I added comments to stories that were no longer fresh. That Internet-induced fetish for the new provokes a general sense of puzzlement when a comment follows content that is more than a week old. I am guessing about that one-week time horizon, it might even be one day before content is considered old and incoming comments are considered wayward latecomers.

Scrolling through comment boards on certain sites might make one embarrassed for being one of the same human race as the people whose sentiments -- if they are even to be believed -- rarely cross the threshold of insight but dive deep into pettiness, ignorance, and depths of cynicism I find unbelievable. I can't recall which sources hosted these particular comments but the first published stories regarding the 2004 tsunami were followed by bafflingly cynical comments blaming America and pre-emptively blaming the world media for ignoring the situation. Many of the stories regarding Bernard Madoff and the people who lost money to his scams were followed by unimaginably petty dismissals of those victims, the verdict among commenters seeming to be that anyone -- ANYONE -- who appears to have money should have it summarily plucked away and that such persons deserve not sympathy but scorn when all their money vanishes.

As I type this this board is a desert, only I know of it and my typing is the only sound here. I feel an energy, though. A connection, an invitation, a welcome screen just for me. This could be my magnum opus. My legacy. A sprawling message board covering every discussion topic imaginable, thousands of posts with caustic diatribes, penetrating insights, legitimate research and new discoveries -- all of it posted by one person. Yes. I may have to assume an occasional alter-ego (something at which I consistently fail) but the cancerously increasing volume of talking to myself would bloat into a morose Beckettian spectacle. But wait -- "spectacle" presumes the public is watching, but there is no value in that.

I dropped that term "magnum opus in sarcastically. What living being could presume to imagine that their work will linger for one moment after passing from this earthly realm. What earthly being takes comfort in knowing that their diurnal lurches will evaporate when the spirit leaves the body?

Yet I think there is something in it for me. Pretense aside I think a BBS for an audience of one has some interest.

Or maybe I'll invite traffic silently by stashing links here or there, or there and here. Here I am breaking in a BBS, tweaking a message board, unaware how I'd handle any attention or activity, and contemplating using a BBS software in a way it is not intended, in a way that even mocks its intended use.

This is like sitting in a bar before it opens. I have been on "live" boards that feel this way. I remember those texty days of dialup BBSes. I passed through boards with Fidonet Echoes, game doors, split-screen one-on-one chat, and local message bases. I used Procomm Plus -- was there a software called Procomm? I seem to remember an exciting improvement from the old Procomm to Procomm Plus, and then a shockingly fast upgrade when I threw out my 1200 baud modem and replaced it with a blazing-hot 2400 baud. 9600 baud seemed impossible to me, and in fact I think I skipped that speed and went straight to 14,400 baud. I thought my computer -- an IBM XT -- would fry and go up in flames when I dialed out through that Intel-branded modem.

The XT was reliable but already aging when it was given to me by a friend in 1991, but it was through that screen that I wandered through countless BBSes and online services. I wish that spirit of discovery -- a spirit of renegade interactivity -- I wish that still existed on the public Internet. But I do not get nostalgic. Times change, and the barriers to entry that made the audiences of those early boards so twitchy are now mostly gone, a trend resisted by early AOL-haters but a trend which nevertheless changed the fundamental character of public message bases.

I believe message boards should be fundamentally unmoderated. With the exception of obvious garbage (spam and illegal activities) I think a forum should moderate itself with rare visits from those virtual hall monitors known as moderators. Where public forums are concerned few things irritates me more than constant reminders from "management" that you are expected to conform to certain guidelines. On the other hand, I understand that approach. To call a forum "public" is not the same as saying it is a place where absolutely anything goes. As in the physical world one's freedom of speech extends as far as the people who host the place will tolerate. That said my outlook on censorship of BBSes is that it's a free forum, and you are free to say what you wish, but others are free to challenge you on your merits, dismiss you outright, and make you look like an ass.

An analogy I saw many years ago (when a troll was posting drunk spew on Usenet just to try and tick someone off) was that yes, you are free to do that just as you are free to sit on a streetcorner ranting drunk and nonsensical -- either way you should be well prepared for the consequences when others challenge you on your merits. I think that dynamic -- the dynamic of discussion or debate versus litanies and pontification -- underlines a fundamental principal of free speech which I think is too often disregarded.