Bombagyár

» see bombagyar.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Polgár Tamás had been blogging as Tomcat since 7 February 2004, on a site attached to the polo shirt business he ran. In August 2007 he took the design and the structure of that blog and turned it into something larger. Bombagyár used the same layout and added everybody else: a community blog where his friends and then a widening circle of contributors posted under their own accounts.

The stated purpose was to give a home to bloggers who said they had been censored or driven off elsewhere. In practice the people who arrived were the Hungarian far right, and that is how every Hungarian reference that covers the site files it. For roughly two years it was where that part of the Hungarian internet gathered, which made it a real thing in Hungarian online history whatever anyone thinks of the contents.

I have no Hungarian, and this was Hungarian argument written for a Hungarian audience, so I can report the shape and very little else. The shape is one I recognize from the same years elsewhere: a single person's blog that acquires a comment crowd and then a donated server, until the person at the center is running infrastructure. The Turkish boards of that period produced the same structure out of hardware talk and game talk.

~ the record ~

~ the door policy ~

To get an account you had to supply a real name and a home address. It wanted a telephone number as well. The justification was that anonymity was what made comment sections unmanageable, and that a site full of people willing to identify themselves would behave better than one full of people who were not.

Set that against the site's own founding complaint, which was about being silenced, and it makes for a strange arrangement: a refuge for the deplatformed that took your papers at the entrance. It did mean Bombagyár knew exactly who was posting on it.

~ novara ~

From March 2008 the site ran on its own machine, paid for by reader donations and named Novara after the cruiser Miklós Horthy commanded in 1917. It hosted more than the blog. Bombagyár Rádió put out 84 weekly episodes on Fridays between August 2007 and November 2009, a downloadable show of news talk and interviews. There was a video arm that filmed events and confrontations, including a January 2008 interview with the musician Fekete Pákó that ended in legal disputes. From August 2008 there was also a torrent tracker called Tbomba, free to join.

Any one of those was ordinary for 2008. Doing all of it at once, off donations, on hardware you owned and had given a name, put Bombagyár somewhere most community blogs of the period never got to.

~ the last friday ~

Polgár had announced that Bombagyár would close in the spring of 2010. It closed on 8 November 2009 instead, and he put up a farewell post the following day without setting out why it had happened early. He and the people around him started a news portal called Bombahír afterward. The community did not reassemble there.

~ who has the domain now ~

bombagyar.hu came back in early 2015 with content that had nothing whatsoever to do with the old site, and it is still going. Today it is a Hungarian WordPress blog whose masthead reads szöveg gyár az igazi bomba gyár, a pun about copywriting. The archived front page from February 2008 is still readable in the Wayback Machine, yellow letters and a stick of dynamite, which is a more honest record of what stood there than anything at the address.

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