I joined up back in '01, just after the first BotCon "Wreckers" comic.
Yee's forum is largely inactive. (I just checked. Apparently, Optimal-T posted there about a week ago.) I tried to register with Yee's forums when they first started. The verification process was inexcusably cumbersome, almost as if it were engineered to discourage people from joining. (I may actually be registered there, but I could not remember how to log in even if I cared to.) Low membership generally leads to fewer threads. Fewer threads provide less occassion to post replies, which gives people less incentive to read, join and post at a forum.
To make matters worse, the forums are a mess visually.
That still didn't explain why he never gave us a warning, but I surmise now that it's because he didn't think there was anything anybody would want on it.
Yee may not have had much warning in that case.
Regarding your question of fans moderating his boards: We actually did that. We were CONSTANTLY asking him to appoint some longstanding members as moderators. Absolutely constantly. I remember only twice did he ever appoint anyone as a moderator, and even then it was sometimes people he knew who weren't all that active in the community, or even strangers who weren't that active. (86 and Dom, and possibly JT, were all moderators at one point, however.)
Not quite. O86, Optimal-T, BigMD and KDogg were the mods at the old BWTF. I was a moderator here and for a short while at CollectorsAnonymous (the old AlleyViper boards).
think it was around late 2006 or early 2007--right when Classics was happening, I think--that Ben's contract with Figures.com ran out, and also I'm pretty sure he was going through a divorce at the time. (This was also not too long after a septic tank flooded into his basement and left him with a lot of, literally, shitty toys.)
It was late spring of 2008 actually. I remember because it was right around when I was dropping out of grad school. I was using a computer at the Suffolk library. I could see the main bwtf.com page, but I could not get the forums. I emailed JT (who I had an ongoing correspondence with) and O86 (a moderator at the old forums). They, being more technically savvy than I was at the time, immediately recognized what was happening. O86 made a desperate run at saving as much contact information as he could from the forums. (Being further away, it actually took more time for the loss of the forums to "catch up" to him locally in New Zealand.) He spent several hours clicking and saving, knowing that each click could be the last.
When the last board shut down, the moderators could still get in. I distinctly remember 86 asking me if there was anything important that I hadn't saved--I think he backed up the Alternators RPG bits we wrote, and that was about it. (In retrospect, I wish he had saved the Cybertron thread we had, where we all wrote tiny fanfiction snippets or discussed ideas about the figures' personalities and backstories.)
It had less to do with O86 being a moderator, and more to do with his location. He had to go through several intermediary servers to view the page. He never interacted directly with bwtf and was seeing "old" copies on the intermediary servers. For similar reasons, I was able to see the page for a bit longer than JT was.
At the time, it was more important to save contact information, rather than content. I still have the some of old emails that became the foundation for this forum. The only reason that discussion happened is because O86 was able to save so many of our email addresses. (The only member whose phone number I had at the time was Scourge.) At some point, I need to make a hard copy of our contact information, just as a precaution.
JT started it, and has graciously put in the time and effort to run it ever since. That guy doesn't get enough credit.
Agreed. Completely.
For almost two years, there was nothing.
It was closer to two months.
You may be able to find what you lost on archive.org -- the Internet's Way-Back-Machine.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://bwtf.com
Hunt it down, repost it here, and everyone can stare at it's beauty. Or realize it wasn't as good as you remembered. One of the two.
The only real downside to WayBack is that it can have up to a 2 year turn-around.
But despite that, save for the occasional spambot attack (including a few *really* vulgar ones that made even using the forums dicey for a little while) and a couple of trolls/bad characters so out of control that Ben DID have to step in to kick them out (Trinachron, RUINATION, Giant Head and his assorted aliases), the forums were generally pretty decent due to the majority of the posters moderating the forums *themselves*. Despite this now-niche group just barely keeping these forums alive, the BWTF forums generally had anywhere from 50-100 members of varying relative activity, meaning discussion moved at a decent clip (though nothing like Allspark or 2005 or anything), but the majority of the people posting there were able to be civil and respectable about it (and encourage others to do the same) that widespread, constant moderation was something that wasn’t especially *needed*.
True enough. The only forum that worked better was the old AlleyViper/CA forums. At one point, the administrator had some serious health issues and had to hand over the reigns to somebody. With one of his last coherent acts before heavy medication took him, he made us *all* adminstrators. Aside from a few people stumbling while adjusting to the technology, (one person accidently blew away everybody's registration for a couple of hours), things went well.
Dom
-agrees about needing to raise our profile.
