CNET Forums

» see cnet.com/forums as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

If you pasted an English error string into a search box between about 2002 and 2012, there was a decent chance of landing on a CNET forum thread from three years earlier where somebody had the same box doing the same thing. That was how most of the world met these forums. For hardware talk I was on the Turkish boards, donanimhaber and frmtr, where the language was mine and the price lists were in lira, but a Windows error message is in English no matter where the machine is, and the English answer was usually sitting on cnet.com.

The forums were old. A Community link shows up in CNET's own navigation by December 1998, and by October 1999 forums.cnet.com was live and quietly redirecting visitors to port 8080, where the discussions ran on WebX, the conferencing software that also carried Salon's Table Talk. That is the generation of software this thing was born into: CGI, a nonstandard port, threads in a frame.

Twenty-two years later it was a modern responsive site with ad slots and a tracking payload, still carrying the same traffic it always had. CNET's own description of itself on the forum page was that its most popular discussions happened in the boards for Windows 10 and for security. The biggest single board held 86,606 discussions. Across the whole system there were more than 530,000 topics.

~ the dossier ~

~ the helpdesk years ~

What CNET Forums actually was, for most of its life, is the free technical support department of the consumer PC industry. Nobody paid for it and nobody was contractually obliged to answer, yet the answers arrived, often from the same handful of regulars who had been doing it for a decade. Manufacturers shipped a phone number that cost money and a forum thread that did not, and people used the thread.

That made the archive worth more than the site. A thread about a 2007 laptop that will not charge is dead weight to an ad network and gold to the one person in 2019 who still owns that laptop. By 2020 the forum pages carried the same ad stack as the rest of cnet.com, and they also carried moderation and hosting costs that a review page does not.

~ the month it changed hands ~

ViacomCBS put CNET Media Group up for sale and Red Ventures agreed to buy it on 14 September 2020 for an announced 500 million dollars. The deal closed on 30 October at 484 million after working capital adjustments. Red Ventures is a marketing company whose business is converting search traffic into commissions, and the package it bought came with ZDNet and GameSpot attached.

On 1 December 2020, thirty-two days after the close, the forums stopped accepting posts. The notice was four sentences long and signed CNET Support. As of December 1, 2020, it said, the forums are in read-only format, and in early 2021 CNET Forums will no longer be available. The closing line thanked people for the advice they had provided to one another over the years. Nobody wrote a word about where any of it would go.

~ what was deleted ~

In early 2021 the pages came down. There was no export tool and no redirect anywhere, since there was nowhere to send people. Half a million threads of volunteer labor were removed from a site that had been monetizing them for twenty-two years.

The rescue happened outside the company. An Archive Team volunteer ran a qwarc crawl of the forum and thread pages in January 2021 and got what reads as a complete set of the text, without the images, and an earlier ArchiveBot job caught some of the rest. The result sits in the Internet Archive under a collection named for the month the deletion happened, which is a strange sort of gravestone: the only readable copy of CNET's community is filed under the date CNET stopped having one.

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