Closed Bulletin Board

A type of online discussion platform whose primary characteristic is that visibility and interaction is limited by means of accounts, usually through a process called registration. What internet vernacular understands as a forum.

It is truly ancient, originating in the late 80s as account management systems were tacked onto Bulletin Board Systems, practices re-implemented during the rise of USENET and WWW. Forums peaked in the late 90s and the early 00s as they enabled both lifelong friendships and profitable networking. They entered a fast decline when widely available server space cheapened hosting enough to enable the open bulletin boards to become faster news-spreading services, promote content remixing, gain popularity and dictate Internet Culture. Today, the additional process centralization has almost erased the forum from the Internet, with pseudo-forums - news-aggregator megaplatforms such as Reddit absorbing all forum activity.

Origin

The gating of the forum was not intentional, but it was organic. The primary factors were:

• Protecting posters from identity theft
• Cultural influence of blog-like mail chains (images were expensive to host!), any making individual posts worth keeping track of.
• Technical limitations for large databases to keep track of posts, quite literally a problem of accounting.
• Demand for heavily personalized posts, signatures and "digital presence".