MacTalk Australia

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

~ the eulogy ~

Matt Kelsh and Anthony Agius met on Overclockers Australia, decided the country needed a place for Apple users to argue, and opened one on 1 January 2004. They called it AppleTalk Australia. It ran on donated money and unpaid labor for the first stretch, then took advertising once the hosting bills got serious, and by late 2005 Hitwise had it at number eight in the Australian IT media rankings. For a forum built by two people with day jobs that is an absurd number.

I know this shape of place from the other side of the planet. My version was donanimhaber and frmtr, where the signature under every post was your hardware list and keeping it current mattered more than it should have. The Australians were doing the same thing about Macs: the arguments, the moderators, the running joke nobody could explain to an outsider, the long thread where somebody's upgrade goes wrong at two in the morning and four people stay up to help. Different hemisphere and different hardware, but the same building.

They were also, for a while, a genuine news source. In 2008 Agius published claims that Apple had briefed Australian resellers about the iPhone launch, and then posted photographs of a box sitting in a store labeled "Do Not Open Until 10 June". News.com.au and iTWire both chased it. A hobbyist forum was breaking Apple's Australian release schedule, which tells you what the mainstream Australian tech press was not doing at the time.

~ the dossier ~

~ the name ~

AppleTalk was already Apple's, a networking protocol from the 1980s, and for two years nobody at Apple cared. What changed it, according to the site's own account, was a member of the forum who had fallen out with the place and decided to tell Apple's legal department it existed. The letter arrived, and in late 2006 the site became MacTalk Australia on a new domain.

It is a small humiliation but it stuck, because the name they were forced into is the one the site died under eight years later.

~ the sale ~

In February 2011 Agius put MacTalk up on Flippa, the auction site, asking for offers above $125,000. By June he had a buyer: Niche Media, the publisher behind Macworld Australia. The reported price was $150,000. Agius said afterward that following such a significant financial and personal investment he was walking away with a significant redundancy package, which is a careful sentence from a man who had just sold a community.

The transfer did not go smoothly. Matt Kelsh, the co-founder who had left before the site went commercial, threatened legal action over the sale. It went through anyway. What followed was the ordinary fate of a forum bought by a magazine company: the magazine was the asset the buyer understood, and the forum was a thing attached to it. Activity thinned out. The front page's last real update was in August 2015, a news post about an El Capitan beta, and it was still the top story when the Internet Archive came back in September 2017. By then the volunteer moderators had already said publicly what the owner never did, which was that the site was dead.

~ the funny part ~

A group of former members built a replacement. They put it on Discourse rather than vBulletin, and when it came time to pick a name they took back the one Apple's lawyers had taken away: AppleTalk Australia. Nobody has sent them a letter.

mactalk.com.au still resolves. It answers with a page whose title is just the domain name, the kind of placeholder a registrar serves when there is nothing behind it, and the eleven years of threads are gone.

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