Black Locust Forum: A fragment

"Good life is the best revenge."
-- Dita von Teese

From my point of view, which is The Point Of View on this page, the whole thing pre-started in the late 2002, which amounts to any time between September and December, when I signed up for Marilyn Manson forum. I was still a fan enough to discuss Manny's matters with others. It was sort of nice at the beginning, but soon I began noticing that the administration is short on building the atmosphere of the place. There were rules, but they wouldn't apply to admins, so they would talk to you in a certain way, but you were not allowed to repay "the kindness." You couldn't have an animated avatar (ah, the old Internet), but they could. Et caetera, et caetera. A lot of small items that eventually piled up into a toxic environment. Although, we wouldn't call it toxic back then. People were assholes and that was it. Toxicity as a commonly shared concept came later.

(Years later, I don't even remember the URL or if there were more MM forums at the time. Here, I'm talking about the one where Gaya or Gaia was the main admin. Not remembering her nickname properly shows me how much of an old new all that is. Googling it turned out fruitless.)

One of the people who had problem with the MM forum was my high-school friend, Spooky Kid, who teamed up with his friend, Gladi, to start their own forum. Gladi, who insisted on writing his nickname as GLad| (but I don't think anyone did), was a foreigner to the whole MM Forum conundrum and had his own reasons, which are lost to the sands of time. On March 2003, at latest, Spooky reached out to me with a question if I would like to become a moderator there and I saw this as an opportunity to show the world how the proper moderation should look like. As I didn't feel strong with heavy metal music, I took hydepark (which was called Gadka Szmatka, "small talk" or "chit chat") and a room for other, non-heavy music (in our twist, we decided to call this room Alternative Music because it was alternative to the core genres of our forum and then we had to explain it to newcomers regularly). We started on April 2003, and Gaya even registered to wish us all the best. I guess she had some redeeming qualities after all. :D

We had underage kids on the forum, so I decided there will be no swearing in my rooms. I couldn't enforce it on a higher level and admins as well as other mods didn't see it as relevant, so I scaled down and focused on what I could control. I had a text file with w BB2 code and I would edit all the swear words to [CENSORED]. Perhaps, I am a communist at the bottom of my heart. As this was manual work, there was no being smart with filtering. Typos or writing it differently would still earn you an edit. I know that, in the end, no one left because of that. The biggest offenders didn't stop swearing and they would reference it and even try to mock it sometimes and so it was our cat-and-mouse game. I would generally use conciliation first, then actual moderator's tools, and it worked extremely well for my rooms. One year, the users held something of "your favourite mod" contest and I won. I took it as the biggest possible "[CENSORED] you" I could show the MM admins. "This is how it's done!"

It was going fairly okay, but around 3 years in, we had a database malfunction and all was lost. Classic. We restarted and I wanted to be more pro-active, but Spooky's take on it was that it's his place and he runs it and he calls shots as he wants, and the other people can be grateful for that, but they don't matter in the grand scheme of things. I, on the other hand, wanted this to be more of a community that we build together with the users. A forum was just a forum, a piece of software without any inherent value. We had a fallout of sorts and I left him be. But not before publishing our chat on my blog. :D I returned later under another nickname (Chachi, after a bubble-gum seal from one episode of "Cow and Chicken"). I even moderated one room, but something was irreversibly lost. And also, we were different people and I had another things going on for me. We simply moved on.

I can't say for sure how Black Locust Forum ceased to exist. It's a quite common story: a group of youngsters start something, then they have an argument, then it ends. I can see that now in open-source projects and Mastodon instances. But it was one hell of an experience that taught me a lot about building communities and teams and I benefit from it till this day.

All in all, I have good memories of Black Locust Forum. We did our best and it worked for a while. And that's something.