Closed Bulletin Board

A type of online discussion platform where visibility and interaction is limited by means of keeping accounts. What internet vernacular understands as a forum.

It is truly ancient, originating in the late 80s as account systems were implement on Bulletin Boards, systems that were re-implemented during the rise of USENET and WWW.

Evolution

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".