The Last BBS

The reality site I've been an admin/writer at for over a decade is being shut down this week.

It started out as a fan-created and fan-run site in 2002. It became very popular. The owner sold it to TV Guide (yes the magazine) in 2007, thinking that it would mean the site would grow and become even bigger.

TV Guide did nothing with the site other than fix it when it broke down.

CBS acquired TV Guide a few years later. They also did nothing with the site except fix it when it broke down. Neither company ever consulted with us or tried to take a hand in running it. We were still a fan-run site, just with mysterious corporate owners.

Without any notice or warning, on Friday our homepage's logo banner was replaced with a JPG announcing that the board would be shut down "next week" and redirected to a community page at TV.com. The communities at TV.com are a joke and are nothing like a threaded message board.

So the forum's available staff (basically me and one other person) has spent the weekend opening a new, nearly identical board at ProBoards and trying to alert the whole membership of the move before the old site suddenly disappears.And any information from the site has to be copied by hand, because we don't have the FTP access to backup/export the whole board.

12 years of work, wiped out like that. As I waste my whole weekend frantically saving posts and articles to Word docs to paste into new threads.

Fuck.

http://www.fansofrealitytv.com/forums/forum.php

That sucks.

Never sell TLBBS to a tv magazine!

Not for a ZILLION DOLLARS (actually I would sell for a million)

OMG, I just saw this thread. That really sucks.

I used to love TV.com, before TV Guide took it over. It was never as good as a forum, more like commenting on a blog, but there was a fun little group of people. Now they've all gone because TV.com SUCKS. The only thing I use it for now are the tv listings.

We recreated the old forum at ProBoards -- we've had over 200 of the old membership re-register already:

http://fansofrealitytv.freeforums.net/

I went over to tv.com to see if any of the people I used to talk to were still there, and found only one them. She and some others were complaining about tv guide abandoning the site. It's good that you were able to save your stuff to a new forum.

In one sense, we simply picked up where we left off as if nothing happened, and now we're finally in control of things ourselves.

In another sense, 16 years and millions of posts from thousands of people (not to mention hundreds of articles written by staff) are lost forever.

Hi ho!

thats a real shitter eggs im sorry man i lt happened to a site i had been admin at a ling time in 2012. got biught by someone who wanted the traffic they never communicated and one day logged in to weed out the spam registrations and bam it redirected to ProChan awful awful place.

the site i was admining had over 2million posts and had been incredibly active from 2001-2012 i was gutted.

Feelin ya -- thanks. Drop by here once in a while!

Fuck these housemoms and all their emotional problems. I just wanna watch Big Brother and snark about it, and they want the site to be their fucking babysitter, analyst and favorite opioid. FUCK THESE PROVINCIAL HEADCASES.