This was a reply to a message someone sent asking how long the average Bulletin Board stays alive. It was typed in on-line and hasn't really been edited much since, so apologies for the mess its in. It is mainly written about UnaXcess, a bulletin board and talker system that ran in Bradford from 1989 to 1991. This is all still relevant today so I thought I'd include it in my colletion; especially when watching the current splits happening on IRC. Incidentally, it will be interesting to see if this stuff applies to Internet Service Providers. ------------------- I recon the life cycle of these things is about 2 years max, often a lot shorter - This figure is an educated guess, but it is based on experience and hopefully backed up by example. The start up of a bulletin board (or MUD, or any system where people can communicate and form social groups) is quite exciting. It will start off with a few key people, often the people who wrote it and the people who tested it, and more and more people will come along. The speed of this depends on how well it is advertised and how many other things of a similar type there are out there. If the system is reasonably good, it should be possible to poach a group of people dissatisfed with another system, and get them to move to the new one. They will bring a few more people, and eventually, as well as the original authors and testers, you will have a new group of people who already know each other. By now, the system is being used so it will attract "the newbies". People on chat systems seem to hate the newbies, possibly because it reminds them that they behaved like that once. The system now has quite a thriving community, but there is this problem that the old timers want to be seperated somehow from the new users - Public demand is such that the authors have to start to implement privilege levels and various other status features. This has now created a rift... The people who have the privileges, and the people who don't. There is now the danger that the authors of the board, and the original testers want more privileges than the rest of the people, and so the privilege system generally gets more and more convoluted. What happens now, depends on how the system is run. If it is fairly anarchistic (A lot of the PSS bulletin boards, early Essex MUDs and the Internet Relay Chat) then there may be battles. If it is a benevolant dictatorship (Cheeseplant's house, Bullet, Unaxcess), the system will become full of argument on who should have what privileges, and why some people are more deserving than others. If it is a complete dictatorship (Later Essex systems and any of my systems) then discussion is allowed, but mostly ignored and things carry on as dictated. In my experience the latter system works better; though systems run on an anarchistic basis do seem to last the longest but with a lot fewer users. Inevitably, some part of the community will be pissed off. They will fight for some privileges that they seem to think they want, they will get more and more pissed off that they are being classed the same as the newbies they so hate and they will want change. There has to be a split. What will now happen is that this part of the community will look for somewhere else to go. If they are lucky, they will find a little used new system and make it theirs (so now they will become the 1st community on the system after the authors) or, one of the group will write their own and make themselves God. Since this started about UnaXcess, I thought it may be interesting to see how it started, and how it died - This is from memory, dates will be bad, and names will be bad, but it's roughly right. UA was started by Bobo and he enlisted the help of a few students to run the thing. For months, no-one used it at all since they were still using UCL Bullet (slightly) Lampeter BB (not very much at this time) and Southampton's SBBS (a lot more). Most of these systems were heavily administered by me, and UnaXcess was in the position of being completely "Lorry free". It was actually unusual in that the first few users of it could be described as "newbies" - They were not on the general JANET scene. Eventually, people started to go there. There was no sudden rush as a group broke away from SBBS but the facilities that UA offered were far better. As more users came, more conferences were started and the users decided that the two levels (Fairwitness and User) were not enough - They wanted a special privilege that meant the user could moderate a conference. This is where the rot set in really, the big mistake was giving the "Editors" their own conference that normal users didn't have access to, they assumed much greater power than they really should have had, and furthermore, started to demand the ability to moderate the chat system as well. Interestingly, at this time, they had made me a Fairwitness - A few weeks later, they banned me for my views. This was probably the move that killed UnaXcess in the end. The "management" was now split on whether I should have been thrown off or not - Dylan had been thrown off at this time as well and there was masses and masses of political infighting as to who should be new Fairwitnesses. It didn't help that Bobo seemed to be going mad and when he phoned the Computer Crime Unit to report Dylan for hacking the machines the first day that the computer misuse act came in, it seemed to back this assumption up. (I intervened at this point and calmed things down, Dylan had done nothing wrong and the whole thing was a silly waste of police time). Then... they started to get carried away with their own success. They came up with the brilliant idea that as they were the major BB on JANET they should start charging. They implemented pricing by making sure that people who had paid, got a faster session, and people who hadn't got an unusable one. This worked for a few weeks, but eventually the board was only used by the people who paid (just over 200 of them, in fact). The rest all wandered off to other places where the service was ok and a few weeks Later Bobo announced his resignation from the University. UnaXcess finally died when, in yet another argument as to whether I should be re-instated as a Fairwitness, Bobo physically unplugged the line driver and stated that if they weren't going to listen to him, they couldn't have a service. The board died, the money was never paid back to the users and the machines donated to the UnaXcess project went missing. UnaXcess went with a bang, not with a whimper but its time was up anyway. Various other BB systems had been formed (mostly illegal ones) to take the people and eventually, the masses took themselves to a talker running at Warwick University called "Cheeseplant's House". Oddly enough, Cheeseplant's house lasted about two years as well and ended on a similar note with the people generally going to IRC when it died. Michael. -- A footnote about IRC -- At the time of writing this, IRC was on its first split. When there were very few British users on IRC, there was no channel to cater for them. eventually, when JIPS started, a few people started a #UK channel (the name coming from the uk.ac.sitename convention). I recon that the #UK channel lasted about one and a half years, and died because the new people got sick of the implicit control the "old timers" had on it. #UK split into two new channels, #GB and #England. #England has undergone lots of splits, for a while it was run by someone from Croatia or something equally obscure. To my memory the #GB channel was actually formed by Gedge as a safe haven for one user who later turned out to be mentally ill. The people who ran the #UK channel (running a channel on IRC is a lot easier when you are IRC operators) didn't want him there, so we/they kept him off. A lot of sympathy went with Gedge and his crowd and so #GB became the British channel and the #UK people (Me, Andie, Dunc, Klets and Gummi) eventually wandered off elsewhere. IRC has split itself off a few times, there is the Undernet, and a few others that don't last long. The Undernet looks set to last now and it'll be interesting to see what happens when a #GB channel is formed on there. MJL. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (C) 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1995 - Michael Lawrie. This document may be redistributed or quoted from as long as I am referenced as the author. All rights reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------------