June 8th, 02007 <br />
Some notes on my investigation of the death of projectw.org <br />
<br /><br />
Alternating from my usual pattern of using <a href="http://opera.com/">Opera</a> for my web browsing, maybe one week ago I decided to start up <a href="http://mozilla.org/">Mozilla</a> <a href="http://firefox.org/">Firefox</a> to check out <a href="http://groovynotes.com/">GroovyNotes</a> and <a href="http://allpeers.com/">AllPeers</a> as well as the state of the forums listed on <a href="forums.txt">my forums.txt list</a> through <a href="http://shaneliesegang.com/personal/">Shane Liesegang</a>'s <a href="http://shaneliesegang.com/projects/coffee.php">MorningCoffee</a> plugin, which allows the user to implement lists of websites to load up per some day of the week after clicking on the provided coffee icon. Due to the original order in which the forums were listed, projectw.org was the first that was supposed to be pulled up-- soon I would learn that it had been dead for maybe one or two days at that point.<br /><br />

What first piqued my curiosity was the community website for projectw.org that had well over tens of thousands of registered members and questionably high volumes of its membership online at any point that I visited the website. When I was doing forum development and programming four or five years ago, I was surprised to even find forums on <a href="http://ezboard.com/">ezboard.com</a> with more than  10<sup>^3</sup> members, and the same when I learned of <a href="http://invisionfree.com/">invisionfree.com</a>, a non-commercial forum hoster that automatically generated clean installations of <a href="http://invisionboard.com/">InvisionBoard</a> (one of the many forum packages in the league of <a href="http://phpbb.org">phpBB</a>, <a href="http://ikonboard.com">ikonboard</a>, <a href="http://yabbforum.com/">YABB</a>, and many others all of which are less the age of <a href="http://infopop.com/>Infopop</a>'s <a href="http://www.infopop.com/products/ubbclassic/">UBB</a> or <a href="http://jelsoft.com/">Jelsoft</a>'s <a href="http://vbulletin.com/">vBulletin</a>). Over at <a href="http://phpbb.com">phpbb.com</a> in 2003, <a href="http://www.phpbb.com/community/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&sid=4087964391bed618a5f5abf4304f12ee&u=12">SHS`</a> made <a href="http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?p=385026&sid=4087964391bed618a5f5abf4304f12ee#p385026">a good post re: popular forum systems</a> at that time and looks fairly comprehensive (even if it does indeed neglect my own packages from that era). Maybe forums have become significantly more popular in the last five years, or perhaps more aptly stated, finding large cybercommunities is easier now.<br /><br />

At any rate, with the apparent death of projectw.org, I took it upon myself to search with <a href="http://omgili.com/">Omgili</a> for related discussions, <a href="http://feedster.com/">Feedster</a> to scan through the blogs, and Google to pick up anything else. After quickly scanning through one or two blog posts, and maybe one or two forums that had related discussions, it became apparent that there were some people taking advantage of the death and advertising other communities with related intentions, discussion subjects, etc. Within ten minutes I had collected maybe twenty different communities that were all constructed to pick up the members of the dead projectw.org that were searching to find out where the forum went. These newly created communities were but hours old, and had hundreds of members each of them, but never much more, except for the communities that were the "peers" or the forums with relatively the same size. <br /><br />

Sadly, due to recent laptop troubles (yeah, still using the <a href="http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/Gateway/M675/3501731sp75.shtml">Gateway M675</a> and yes, the <a href="http://loke.as.arizona.edu/~ckulesa/tp390e/information.html">now ancient IBM Thinkpad 390E</a> is still under one of the desks), access to the logs with the links and notes on this investigation is unavailable, but when that five volt, two-fifth watt <a href="http://sunonusa.com/">Sunon</a> MagLev fan arrives through <a href="http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/shipping/time/service/ground.html">UPS Ground</a>, the information will be posted up. 


To the keen observer, this explosion of new communities matches such biohistorical events such as the <a href="http://www.palaeos.com/Paleozoic/Cambrian/Cambrian.htm">Cambrian explosion</a>, even though there is very small degree of variability in each of the new niche communities that are popping up.

<br /><br />
<a href="http://heybryan.org">kanzure@gmail.com</a>
<br /><br />
Just some more information for myself, eventually: written and composed on the <a href="http://sony.com/">Sony</a> <a href="http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/model-documents.pl?mdl=PCVRS510">PCV-RS510</a> with some sort of Sony flat-screen LCD void of product designation information (how odd).

<br />