Exactly. This is how “missing stairs” are usually identified in communities that strive for inclusion and diversity (e.g. SFF conventions, academia), long before official action is taken against the creeps (if it’s taken at all). The same went for BB BBS, where we had several missing stairs who were allowed to stick around for many years despite making other members of the community feel unsafe.
From what limited engagement I’ve had here, you and @tinoesroho – supported by the active members – have done a marvelous job maintaining those goals. I hope that new members will take some time to read/listen, get the vibe of the place, and understand that it’s a venerable establishment that doesn’t need new leadership.
I mentioned the “short list” of other possible names above. I think you founders settled on the best choice. It really is a good fit, plus there’s the tie-in to “St. Elsewhere” (TV show with the snow globe)
I’m confused about the by invitation discussion. I found this place kinda by accident a few years ago when I noticed a few users missing at the old place, did a web search on their user names, and hello Elsewhere. I lurked here a bit, then when the other place did what it did in October, I created an account here. No one invited me—I showed up and invited myself. Did I slip thru some crack in the rules (that I didn’t know about)?
You got me curious. Luckily, my 'nym here is also a psychedelic techno band, which eats up the search. @mindysan33’s elsewhere comments is the very first result, though. Likewise @DukeTrout. I had no idea.
As far as I’m concerned, you’re very welcome here!
And yes, this place is open to web searches. There’ve been a few people who stumbled across us who were never at TOP. I don’t think they stuck around long, but they didn’t cause any problems while they were here.
@gremlinmentioned stumbling across this place a few weeks ago, and I was curious at the time exactly how they did, but I didn’t ask.
Imagine my surprise when I logged into BB for the first time since mid October to find that the community had shuttered. So glad I stumbled upon this bbs!
I happened to Google my own username around that time, and the search returned comments of mine both on BB and this place.
Absolutely not. Although we have been invite-only for short periods maybe a couple of times in the past, it is intentional that anyone can sign up. Invitations automatically elevate a user to TL1, and a user must be TL2 in order to extend invitations.
Until fairly recently, crawlers were the majority of traffic on the site:
For anyone TL2 or above, feel free to create or post in topics in the #the-clubhouse category, which will not be indexed by search engines, or in the #lounge for TL3 and above. Any topics outside of those categories will be subject to indexing and therefore anonymous viewing.
I tried this for me, out of curiosity. Google returns 0 relevant results on the first page for “lockecj”, whether I’m logged in or not, and DuckDuckGo returns relevant results for the same search term, but none of them point back here. Are there other search engines?
I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. I picked a really common name and search engines probably see the suffix as noise anyway. It’s been ~30 years, there’s probably no point in changing it now.
I’ve been thinking about this for the last day, and the more I think about it, the less it makes sense to me in an online context. We’re not talking about a school or workplace, where one is constrained by physical space and boundaries in who one can interact with, where if others decide not to interact with you, you become excluded and potentially isolated. Online one ideally interacts only with those one wants to interact with, with various filters and gateways applied to allow that to happen as much as possible. No one is owed an interaction, even out of politeness (unlike in various real world social contexts).
As someone who is a longtime BB reader (going back to the paper zine days), and who wasn’t part of any BB Lounges or secret clubs or whatever, I can sum up my feelings with the meme:
They were one of a billion things online that I also wasn’t part of. The BB community has most of my favorite online people, absolutely adore them, but I don’t feel “left out” in the slightest. If people want to communicate with me, they will, and that’s awesome, but if they don’t, I hope they can ignore me.
I think I was googling to learn more about the decision to move to SS and seeing if anyone had anything to say on the internets. Clicked on a result and tadaa, here we are!
I also showed up here when another user pointed me here, I just signed up and it was like old times.
But then I got a DM telling me the process was invites after being vetted by the group and one vote is enough to keep someone out.
And I shouldn’t share the site.
It it was it is, not my house so I’ll follow the rules and not let anyone else know but there are a bunch of posters on the other site that I see never made it over.
Just keep in mind, there might be good reasons for that. I see no reason why people at the old place who made others feel unsafe (for whatever reason) should get an invite here, yeah? Maybe you did not see that yourself (it was a big place attached to a highish profile old internet site - and you are a cisgender white dude with some privilege) but our goal is to keep all of us feeling safe.
You might not have been aware of people getting sort of low-key harassed in one way or another by other posters back there, but I promise you, it happened, and sometimes it would take a while to bring it to the attention of people who might not be on the look out for stuff like that, because it’s not a part of their regular experience online.
I often said back that the old place that there were people actively trying to take the place down… and now and again, you’d have people show up, and glide in under the radar with bad intent and they could end up flying under the radar for a while, until there was enough evidence to bring it to the attention of the moderators. We often were able to catch many them eventually, but if they came in with a liberalish rhetoric, making all the right sounds, but with a goal of undermining the site or specific people on it, they could often be harder to figure out.
Looking back at that topic and all the now-@anon accounts on there, and thinking of how many people were thrown out of the community at the time for committing the mortal sin of annoying HFB makes me really sad. (Also, because the actual show itself was just so damn good that even that infamous ending couldn’t ruin it, but I feel kind of bad talking about it here.)
But, at least it ultimately brought us this place, so it wasn’t all bad.
I wonder how much of this is taking childhood admonitions to heart about always including one’s peers in things. (It makes total sense when talking about children, at school, as even problematic behavior by kids can indicate something going wrong in their lives which potentially could be improved by healthy peer interactions. Outside that context, however, it just doesn’t work. Online, the concept of “peer” doesn’t even make sense either.)
Mostly, though, this brings to mind the expression about being invited to sit at the table with the cool kids (pleasure at the invitation, disgruntlement at lack thereof), a concept which I have never, ever remotely understood. (As a grade-schooler, I understood, purely as a result of films and television, that certain kids were supposed to be considered “cool” and others wanted to be their friends because of this, but for the life of me couldn’t identify who they were in my schools, nor why anyone would want to hang around with these hypothetical - and possibly mythical - people. I understand it even less as an adult.)
