CompuServe Forums

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

~ the eulogy ~

CompuServe charged by the hour and billed in dollars, which settles the question of whether I was ever on it. The modem arrived in my house in 1998, the same year AOL bought the company, and by then its forums were already more than a decade past the era that made them famous. Everything below here is reconstruction.

The forums began in 1981 under the name Special Interest Groups, and there were eight of them when the year ended. Each one was a threaded message area with a file library attached and, usually, a chat room. The library mattered more than people now remember: before anonymous FTP was a thing a home user could reach, a CompuServe forum library was how you got a driver or a shareware program, and the forum next to it was where you asked why the thing would not install.

By the middle of the decade there were hundreds of active groups. AVSIG for pilots, and boards for Atari owners. In the early 1990s CompuServe had hundreds of thousands of people moving through thousands of moderated forums, which at that moment made it the largest organized conversation in the world.

~ the dossier ~

~ the sysop arrangement ~

The governance model is the part worth preserving. CompuServe did not employ the people who ran its forums. It contracted with independent producers, who took responsibility for a forum and then recruited their own sysops to moderate it. Those sysops were contractors too, and their pay came out of the connect-time their forum generated.

That arrangement produced something no modern platform has managed to reproduce. The person keeping order in the aviation forum was an aviation person whose income depended on the aviation forum staying worth reading. Moderation was not a cost center to be outsourced, it was the business model pointed directly at quality. The flaw was the same thing from the other side: a sysop whose subject stopped drawing traffic stopped getting paid.

~ the twenty years after the party ~

AOL completed its purchase of CompuServe in early 1998 and ran the brand down slowly rather than closing it. The dial-up service proper was switched off in 2009. What almost nobody outside the remaining users knew is that the forums simply kept going. They were still there in 2015, still there in 2017, running under a web interface, populated by a small number of people who had been posting in the same rooms since the Reagan administration.

Ownership kept changing above their heads without touching them. AOL went to Verizon in 2015, Yahoo went to Verizon in 2017, and the two were stapled together into a subsidiary named Oath. Somewhere in the inventory of that merger was a 1981 message board system.

~ the notice ~

In November 2017 Oath posted a note saying the forums would be removed on 15 December. The wording was gracious and completely final: for more than two decades the CompuServe Forums paved the way for online discussions on a wide variety of topics, and the company appreciated the participation over the years. Other CompuServe features, the news and the weather pages among them, would continue as normal.

The tech press reacted mostly with surprise that there had been anything left to close. The users reacted the way you would expect from people losing a room they had sat in for thirty years. There was no migration path offered and no export tool, and the archive of what had been said in those thousands of forums was not published anywhere. A format that invented the online community outlived its own relevance by two decades and then went out in a maintenance notice.

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