An Fear Rua

» see anfearrua.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

My forum years were donanimhaber and frmtr, where the signature under every post carried a hardware list and the arguments were about which motherboard to buy. An Fear Rua was the same shape of thing pointed at hurling and Gaelic football, in a country I have never been to, about a sport I have never watched. The shape is what carries across.

Liam Cahill started it in September 2000. He was a journalist and broadcaster who had worked at RTÉ and advised politicians, and the name is Irish for the red-haired man, an answer to An Fear Ciúin, the quiet man, a pseudonym an old GAA correspondent had used in the Irish Press. The site ran in both English and Irish, which for a message board in 2000 was a genuine editorial decision rather than a gesture.

What it became was the place where Gaelic games talked about themselves without a press box in the way. Supporters posted under handles and said what county boards and team selectors would never have heard to their faces. In an amateur sport covered mostly by local papers with local relationships, an anonymous national forum was the only room where that conversation could happen at all.

~ the case file ~

~ twelve years of losses ~

The site never made money. Not in a lean year, not in a good year. Cahill went through multiple advertising agencies across twelve years and the average take was around ten thousand euro annually, against hosting bills and the enormous unpaid labor of moderating a forum that argued for a living.

His own figure for what he had put in was about a hundred and fifty thousand euro. That is the real economics of the forum era, and it is why so few of them survived: the ones that mattered culturally were almost always funded by one person's stubbornness, and stubbornness does not renew annually the way a hosting contract does.

~ the libel problem ~

Ireland's defamation law puts the burden in a place that makes hosting anonymous opinion genuinely dangerous. Cahill said he was no longer prepared to walk the tightrope between an open anonymous forum and the libel laws, and he was blunt about the membership too, calling out a growing minority of the 10,277 registered users for an unreasonable sense of entitlement about what they could post.

The other half of his argument was that the format itself had aged out. An anonymous internet forum, he said, is an anachronism, overtaken by open identity platforms like Twitter and Facebook. That is a harsh thing for a forum publisher to write on the way out, and it was mostly correct about where the conversation went next. It was not correct about what got lost in the move.

~ the statement on the front page ~

There was no wind-down and no read-only archive period. On 11 September 2012 the statement went up and the site was gone, twelve years after the first post, and the Irish sports press wrote about it the next morning like a death notice.

What replaced it was Twitter, where the same supporters said much the same things under their real names to smaller audiences and with no thread to come back to. A forum is a room. A timeline is a corridor. The people who spent twelve years in that room mostly did not follow each other into the corridor, and the county-by-county argument An Fear Rua had hosted simply dispersed.

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