The thing is... Simon and I have never met. We've spoken on the phone a fair few times, but there has never been a face-to-face meeting.

I stumbled across the Ship about a month or so before the official launch in the spring of 1998, via a link from Anglicans Online. The original board was implemented in July of that year. (Trawl around in the Ship's Archive for an article that Steve Tomkins wrote, it's freakin' hilarious.) I remember when there weren't that many of us, and looking around, the only people still left from that first month or so on the boards are me, David Rayner, Steve T, Dyfrig, Chris, rachel (not rachel_o, the rachel who had Sven in Minnesota), DP, rosemary and Fudge. (Apologies if I left anyone out.)

Anyway, in January of 1999, I was a regular member, just like you, until the Ten-Horned Beast of the Apocalypse descended upon the poor, unsuspecting souls of the bulletin board. I'm not going to get into the details, unless someone really, really wants to know, but I will say that it took three months before she finally left us alone, and to make that happen Simon, Suse (no longer here) and I spent days and nights deleting thousands of posts; we shut the board down in order to implement the registration and subscription requirement; and David, Simon, Douglas (no longer here), Claudine (again, no longer here) and I spent countless hours doing battle on other (now-defunct) bulletin boards where she had gone to rally people against us.

Because of ALL that we had been through, and because we were also the group that put the original 10Cs together, we sort of became board advisors. At the time I was working a job from 3~11p which was SO BORING that I would pray "please, God, let someone post a message". So I became very active in overseeing the boards, and gradually Simon ceded various responsibilities to me.

quote:

---

If you want the long and boring one, just ask.

---

we are asking.......

quote:

---

Originally posted by starbelly:
And Erin, If you could put it all in the form of a Traditional Folk Song, that would be even better!

Neil

---

The trouble with that is now the only melody that is echoing through my brain is the theme song to Gilligan's Island. Thanks a lot.

More memories, huh? It took us about three months to get to a situation where we needed the 10Cs. And that, interestingly enough, came out of a discussion on tolerance!!

Oh, and Laura the admin was the person who proposed the board split that happened about two years ago.

The other hot topic, which was so very recently resurrected and subsequently beaten to a bloody pulp, is the likening of a member's position to that of a universally-reviled group. That generates far too much heat, and absolutely no light, so in the interest of community preservation that is simply out of bounds. A big explosion a year ago over this particular technique (note: I was not involved in that debate AT ALL) led us to implement this policy.

We also had a shipmate who was in the habit of telling those who did not agree with his interpretations of the Bible that they were going straight to hell. Again, huge argument, so that's out of bounds.

Simon is editor, owner, designer, and basically The Final Word. Just about all the board functions are delegated to me, as he has loads of other things to worry about outside of them. I, in turn, have delegated them outwards. Once upon a time, when there was one lonely bulletin board, I was it.

I am the Community Editor, which basically translates to manager of the bulletin boards, along with other community functions. (There are six editors, total.) Besides the stuff y'all see (responding to 10C violations, tech support, etc.), I manage the hosts behind the scenes. I'm responsible for the direction and high-level maintenance of each forum, recruitment and management of the hosts, and decisions about threads, posts and members. If members have complaints about hosts, they are referred to me. I spend a lot of time in trend analysis, too, to see if we're headed in the right direction and what the next step in our evolution should be.

David and I sort of split the overall, high-level functions -- he deals with a lot of the technical stuff and I deal with the people aspect of the boards, though we cross-cover each other's functions quite regularly.

Clare and Laura are member administrators, which means that if (the general) you continue to argue with a host after a ruling, the host turns it over to one of them and they deal with it. They do everything that David and I do, with the exception of major board maintenance and disciplining hosts.

The hosts are the people who are responsible for the day-to-day running of the boards, as well as communicating to the administrators and editors any problems, suggestions or comments that come from the members. Each board's hosts are the primary guides, so to speak, of the boards, but all hosts offer opinions and suggestions about the direction of each board. For example: David, Ruth, Tom and 'frin run Hell. With rare exceptions, they make 100% of the decisions about how the place operates on a daily basis, but it is not done in a vacuum. They get input from me, from other hosts, and from Steve Tomkins and Simon before they make the decision, but in the end the decision is theirs. They interpret the 10Cs through their board's guidelines, which is why some things that earn a nudge from a host on one board are engaged in by a host on another.

A lot of discussion happens behind the scenes, between hosts, between administrators, between editors and writers. We propose ideas, talk them out, weigh the pros and cons, look at it from every possible angle, see what our options are, and then make decisions. A perfect example would be the sex edition -- this had already been discussed by the writers and editors for the main site, then the boards were brought into it as it is the point of interaction for all of our readers. We had to determine what the potential problems were, how we could best deal with them, and who would take on which responsibilities in all of it.

So them's the basics. Does that help at all?

I take it you and Simon took turns doing this for a couple of weeks.

You also said something about helping prevent Joanne from shutting down other boards.

This whole thing sounds really bizarre.

I'm very glad you guys managed to keep the ship afloat.

The first time we ever had to consider having anything approaching a rule was when someone posted something about their personal experience and someone else responded insensitively to it -- which led us to caution people about the wisdom of posting overly personal stuff. After that, the first version of the 10 Commandments was assembled in response to specific events onboard.

Hurricane Joanne struck us on 7 January 1999. It's memorable to all old-timers here because it was so completely unexpected and traumatic. Joanne was warmly welcomed, like all newcomers. She debuted by asking us all to spam another website that she violently disagreed with. When we checked the site, it turned out to be a role-playing game, so various people told Joanne that they thought spamming it was unnecessary. This was met with incredible hostility, and Joanne heaped personal scorn and ridicule on anyone who attempted to calm her down.

At this point, she also started large numbers of new threads, all designed to start flame wars, and she dominated every active thread on the board. Basically, we were being spammed ourselves, and normal conversation very quickly became impossible.

Our board software at this point was pretty basic, so when I finally asked Joanne to leave us, she simply refused to go, and there was nothing we could do about it. The incident you mentioned, Moo, took place on Sat/Sun night 30/31 January, when Joanne posted many hundreds of messages on the board, which Erin and Suse deleted manually... no wonder it took 8 hours. I seem to remember the night concluding with the entire text of Amazing Grace, with Erin and Suse posting the verses alternatively.

The only way to be rid of our unwanted guest was to shut down the board, which we did the next day. We reopened a week later with newly-written software that gave us a registration procedure and some protection against people who wished us harm.

Joanne then registered a few times under different usernames (but her unique style quickly gave her away, of course), and we repeatedly booted her back out. She then took her quarrel with us to another bulletin board, The Godless Zone (sadly no longer running), where our banning of Joanne was hotly debated and where we were initially taken to task for censorship.

A few weeks later, The Godless Zone banned her themselves, as she did to them what she had done to us. Erin wrote about it: "They, like us, sought to engage her in dialogue. They, like us, tried to ignore her, warned her, and finally banned her. She took that fight to still other boards, and then dragged Ship of Fools there with it." I think the fight continued on a further three boards across the Net.

One of the things this episode taught me was that it is very difficult to draw solid lines between "real life" and what happens on the Net -- it was a line a lot of people tried to draw solidly in those far-off days. Joanne's behaviour was cruel in the extreme (I especially recall her vicious attacks on one poster's marriage, which was at an already agonising point of collapse at the time) and she left in her wake a lot of confused, distressed and wounded people -- all through words typed onto a screen. The wounds were real, not virtual.

The rest of our structure (rules, hosts, admins, the separate boards) evolved over time in response to quarrels, growing numbers and our desire to try different and better ways of doing things.

Hope that's long enough on Joanne... As for the drunken party, Chapelhead, I'll post something on it when I've had a whisky or two.

[ faulty date fixed ]

Ooooh... rereading through what Simon posted, there's one bit he left out -- she was originally booted in mid-January, but she refused to go. Neoworks logged her IP address and then banned that ISP's customers from posting on the bulletin board. She joined AOL to get around the block on her original ISP, which is when we finally decided that the registration software needed to be implemented.

(The Amazing Grace thing happened the night Simon chucked her the very first time.)

The battle between good and evil, simon (obi wan kenobi?), and erin (luke skywalker?Princess leia? yoda!?!??!) versus Joanne, the darkest, cruelest christian poster on the internet!

There are at least two Simon Jenkins. One is our dear Captain, and the other is a writer for The Times. Both are published authors.

quote:

---

Originally posted by The Wanderer:
Personally I think there is real status in having a member number below 100. Is there any way of buying one, like a rare car number plate?

---

And I paid my tenner ya skinflint!

quote:

---

Originally posted by The Wanderer:
When I first started posting on SoF it was on another set of discussion boards - ... what happened to them?

---

Check out the Caption Competition. The neoworks software is used for the displaying the captions.

When the boards became subscription the letters page was kept as a way for non paying readers to put up comments on the ship content. People would email Simon, would would format it into html and post them up as a list of links. I imagine this became increasingly tedious for him, so a bit later the neoworks board format was used so that people could post their own 'letters'. There was something in the blurb about there being a bit of a time delay (just so people didn't think they were getting the full bulletin board experince maybe?!) though I'm not sure if this was ever the case or a bluff!

IIRC when the boards did the heaven/hell etc split this was renamed from the 'letters page' to 'shiptalk board'.. and in reality became a sort of parallel discussion comunity to the main boards - yeah... the skinflints! So when the boards went free again it made sense to integrate them all.