Closed Bulletin Board

A type of online discussion platform where visibility and interaction is limited by means of keeping 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 systems tacked on Bulletin Board servers, systems that were 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 serve spaces cheapened hosting enough to enable the open bulletin boards to gain popularity and dictate internet Culture. Today, the additional process centralization has almost erased the forum from the Internet, with megaplatforms such as Reddit absorbing all forum posters.

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".