livedoor Free BBS

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

~ the goodbye ~

The page is still in the archive, in a character encoding nobody has had to think about for twenty years. It says that livedoor Free BBS ended its service on 31 January 2007, thanks you for using it over the long term, and points at a notice page that is gone. Before that capture the archive's record for the same address had run to about six and a half kilobytes every month for years; from February 2007 it drops under one, and three more captures carry the same small goodbye, unchanged into April.

What it had been giving away since December 2000 was a message board. Its own description made the selling point plain: a bulletin board is essential to a homepage or a community, and here you can have a fast, full-featured one without knowing anything about CGI or programs. You picked a style, you got a numeric board ID in the three millions, and your corner of the Japanese web existed at an address like www1.bbs.livedoor.com followed by your number.

Boards came in flavors. There was an icon board, a beginner customization board and an advanced one, each with its own manual and its own help forum staffed by the people using it. A single board answered at several different URLs depending on whether you wanted the posts flat or threaded, with a tree view alongside them. The argument about how to display a conversation was already old by then.

~ the chronicle ~

~ no cgi required ~

That phrase is the whole business model of the era compressed into three words. Around 2000 a message board was a CGI script you uploaded to a host that allowed CGI, with file permissions to set and a Perl version to worry about, and the number of people who wanted a forum was far larger than the number who wanted that afternoon. Free hosts existed to stand between the two groups.

livedoor also used the boards as a shop window. It ran promotional topic boards of its own on the front page, including one hosted under the name of the television personality Mihoko Yamada, where you were invited to talk about relationships with somebody off the television. The free board host was partly a service and partly a way to keep people on livedoor.

~ twenty-six months of not quite closing ~

On 30 November 2004 the front page grew a notice: new registrations for livedoor's free boards had been suspended, and anyone wanting a board should go to the livedoor Rental BBS OTD service instead. The free product was being wound down in favor of a product the same company charged for.

Then nothing happened for over two years. The page kept the notice, the existing boards kept working, and the archive's record for the front page sat between 6,446 and 6,460 bytes through 2005 and 2006, which is the signature of a page nobody is editing. Twenty-six months is a long hospice for a web service. Everyone who had a board kept it, and everyone who wanted one had already been sent somewhere else, so the thing simply idled.

~ the tombstone that stayed up ~

The month it finally went is the interesting part. livedoor had been raided a year earlier, in January 2006, and Takafumi Horie had gone from magazine covers to a defendant's seat. By the end of January 2007 the company was visibly contracting: on the thirtieth it told the press it was closing its own news reporting division at the end of February. The free boards went dark the next day.

The shutdown was clean in the mechanical sense. Every board URL class went to a redirect at once, the index pages and the flat view and the thread view and the tree view and the admin script, all of them answering 302 on the same February day. Nothing in the archive suggests a board survived in read-only form. For a Turkish reader none of this was ever reachable anyway, since it was Japanese throughout and the boards were written by and for people in Japan, but the shape is familiar enough. A free thing gets quietly frozen, sits that way for as long as nobody has to decide anything, and comes down on a Wednesday.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »