The moral of the story is, don't depend on a corporate board. Have a back up board ready for downtime, and in case your internet community gets shut down.

Buffistas smart.

Ahhhhh, I see. In the bits and pieces I shoved together in my head, I pictured a board divided, a great battle, and then a band of ruffians banding together and taking themselves overseas to start a new!colony that was the Buffistas.

I'm so into history. Ima find me the very first Buffista posts and poke around.

Thank you, Allyson. I yike stories.

Allyson telleth the official history. But there was the blood of the Bronze that I loved. The posters themselves. Many were smart people. Funny, witty, lovers of the argument. Disagreement, debate were honored. They used words like swords -- sometimes they unfairly wounded but mostly they did the honorable battle. (I have heard of the Color Wars and the Topic Wars, and much blood was spilt.)

Board got bigger as the show grew in popularity. The Bronze was, for want of a better description, the intake value of Buffy on-line fandom for most new internet fans. 'Twas good to have new blood, but there was also a change in the culture. More bezoars. More chatroom-like behavior. More VIP-hunters. But some real diamonds too. Allyson is one. There were many, many others.

TheWB shutting the Bronze (prematurely) was tough, but UPN never getting the new board right really did drive the final massive fragmentation of the community. I love the Beta features (look -- spoiler font and we can edit!), but the sense of the broader Bronzer community never really did vest there for me.

He went apeshit that the stole Bronze.

That's not really true. He was very nice about the whole thing. The guy who stole it, however, went completely apeshit. And then proceeded to tell people that I had hacked into the WB servers and stolen the code. Which was, apparently, why I closed JWnet and SGcom. It was part of my plea bargain.

I guess Tim didn't mind that his webmaster was cybercriminal. Or maybe he didn't get the memo.

The moral of the story is, don't depend on a corporate board. Have a back up board ready for downtime, and in case your internet community gets shut down.

Wrod. Signed, former Pathfinder/Entertainment Weekly/People.com/WB Bronze /Atlantic poster. I think a lot of those boards folded (or became paid services) because TPTB got fed up with the drama/bullshit that can happen in some communities.

Ahhhhh, I see. In the bits and pieces I shoved together in my head, I pictured a board divided, a great battle, and then a band of ruffians banding together and taking themselves overseas to start a new!colony that was the Buffistas.

I may have misunderstood this, but to be clear Buffistas evolved from Table Talk at Salon.com and W/X and not the WB Bronze, right?

Justin was nice to us. Not so nice to Deaton, methinks.

Though there was the painful emails Justin's business partner sent to Joss offering to build a board for a Mutant Enemy site where he continously called him "Josh."

Buffistas started as TableTalkers, i believe.

There are very, very few Bronzers here. Kristen brought me over to Table Talk about a year before it went pay-to-play and we moved to WorldCrossing.

I'm sad that I missed out on so many valuable years of Buffy discussion when I could have been there. I mean, I was sitting around in a dorm room, watching all the Buffy my roomie could stomach, trolling around the internet. Did I ever think to put the two together and look around? Nooooo. Of course not. That would have been too clever of me.

t sits in Lilty's corner, except for the dorm room part

I was just thinking that.

Kristen brought me over to Table Talk

And I believe you made your posting debut as me.