Without a substantial portion of my time spent lurking searching YouTube this morning – just to find an 80’s song that don’t really like – I devoted some time to doing a detailed study of what, exactly, went wrong with The Black Mesa Cafe of old. There have been, for the record, six distinct iterations of The Black Mesa Cafe since its initial creation. Its first iteration was an embarassingly named ezBoard which I razed just moments after freshman year of high school ended, in 2002. It was white and blue and generally dreadful, and there were a lot of verbs surrounded by ampersands, if you know what I’m saying. *shrug*
The second iteration was a proBoards site in late 2003, and is still probably my favorite of our forums. It was remedial in its complexity, but we had a tight-knit group of people who were really into the whole thing. When the limitations of the platform finally began to influence and limit the ability of our community to interact and grow, we (the administration – a collective of positive-minded people who were intent on leading the community as a whole toward a higher level of interaction – a social stratification that would later come back to haunt us) created an invision board from scratch, and from there enjoyed a brief period of stability and enjoyment.
The third iteration, however, was what I would consider to be the climax of The Black Mesa Cafe’s forum-based history, and I use the term climax in the sense that it was our time of greatest activity, just before the fall.
After the move to Invision (August 15, 2004) we experimented with a number of themes and variations on those themes. This spanned the final four iterations. We went from the stock Invision forum skin (iteration three), and stock Invision features, to a customized forum with all of the features that most of our members had requested, and a few more that were just sort of added on because they “felt right” or we found them to have a certain comedic, nostalgic, or just necessary value (iteration four). Over time, however, we failed to keep captive the focus of our audience, and even our most loyal of members in the community drifted away. Bickering, infighting, and eventually massive recessions in forum activity haulted the forum’s progress toward bigger and better things. The forum went from orange and grey to blue and grey (iteration five) and eventually back to an unnecessarily orange version that still exists today (iteration six). After a lot of debate, and a lot of threats to do so, I chose to close the forums permanently. I wasn’t content to just close the forums, though, because the temptation of reopening them was constantly there in my mind. I kept reassuring myself that eventually people would come around and get excited about the togetherness that the forum brought us, so I kept it locked down but kept it maintained. Eventually, though, it became abundantly clear that it was the forums that were being lost, but that togetherness that made them relevant. So, finally complacent with the reality of the situation (something I was not, at the time, very well known for being capable of), I went to the source; our hosts. I did a maintenance cycle of our content storage service, to clean out broken links or bad data in the actual posts that we still had stored as active or archived, and then interrupted the cycle exactly the way it says not to in the EULA. I wasn’t content to just close the book, I wanted to burn the entire library. And I did. It was fun, really, to watch everyone’s avatars and signatures artifact over as the user-side data corrupted irreparably. Posts skewed, post counts dropped and rose as bit-counters lost track of their strings, all C++ syntax lost to errant commands now being thrown from my PC to the server and back again. Somewhere out there, on a server in a darkened room in some ailing hosting company’s most disused floor, is your user data, perfectly preserved from the day the forum shut down. Post count, avatar, signature, even your relationship status or favorite TV shows, all stored in a few lines of code, waiting to be accessed. A time capsule of sorts seems a fitting memorial for one of my most favorite projects.
So what was it that went wrong? Sometimes a few of us talk about the forums in retrospect, which in itself feels strange, since we initially created the forums under the assumption that they would be around for what we liked to call “forever.” In my own personaly opinion, I’d blame most of the failures of the forum on incidental occurances and poor leadership – which is a self-accusation since, over time, the leadership degenerated into being just me alone. The greatest influence in my favorite era of the forums, and the forum’s co-founder, was busy with a college/work life and eventually dropped off of the net completely. Our greatest contributing members got lives of their own, and the rest of us just sort of fell into a self-sustaining cycle of degradation. Forum post integrity would go from insightful commentary to spam and then back again. The cycle lasted almost a year and a half.
So I nuked it. I eventually went back and reopened the forums, but they’re pretty broken and there isn’t much to see anyway. Just derelicts of lives viewed in snapshots of quick, offhanded remarks about how badly the day is or how crummy the weather’s gotten. Like a slideshow on a projector in your grandfather’s attic, viewing the old boards is something nostalgic for those who were there, and awkward for those who weren’t. Today we have no contributing authors, and posts appear randomly (or in my case, in small, regular groupings with intermittent month-long disappearances). But that’s okay, really. The BMC, my BMC, is still alive. It may be on life-support, but as long as there’s an internet, and the bills get paid, there will always be a place to go to remember that, for a little while anyway, we made things happen that were good fun for everyone.
And that’s enough to get me excited enough to write about it.
(Note: Since the writing of this article I have made the uncorrupted data available at the forums address. If you wish to go back and look at some of your pre-adult life in all its honest ugliness, with all the blemishes and embarrassments fully exposed, you may now do so. A majority of the posts can be found in the Archives, because just before we shut down the forums we did our best to try and bring things back from the brink by reorganizing and cleaning up the content. (It didn’t work, and all that we accomplished was losing the syntax of the original posts because now there’s no evidence of what topics went where.)
So that’s it. The Black Mesa Cafe, as a community, is pretty much finished (or has been for years). I’ll be migrating some content here and there, with the intent of setting it up as my primary blogging/web groaning site. After all, nothing does not necessarily have to come of nothing. Maybe the Black Mesa Cafe has a future after all, but it will likely be in the hands of a few (or just one), not in the hands of a fledgeling, ADD afflicted community. We had our seven years of mediocrity. Now it’s time for a new era of productivity, in the hands of the only people who were interested in longevity. So, goodbye, Black Mesa Cafe. The world has changed a lot since we first met (actually, I birthed you, you terribly coded piece of garbage), but in the end we’re exactly the kind of alienated bastard children who needed each other the most.
