Simon Willison’s Weblog

Opening times for online forums?

7th October 2003

Here’s something I’ve never seen before. The BBC’s Neighbours messageboard currently has a note up saying “This messageboard is currently closed”, with a link to the opening times: 9am until 10pm weekdays, opening 10am at weekends. You can still read the forums but you can’t post anything. This is obviously a moderation tactic to ensure there is always an administrator available to delete offensive material should any be posted—I’m writing about it here because I’ve never seen this approach used before.

You may well ask what I’m doing on the Neighbours messageboard in the first place. Let’s just call it a guilty addiction—the temptation of 25 minutes of brain-dead telly at lunch time just proves too much. I check out the message boards because they have a great tradition of posting acerbic reviews of each day’s episode, which are far more entertaining than the actual show.