Mobile My Life

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

~ the last words ~

Every country with a phone market got one of these. A forum where people argued about handsets and graphics cards, posted their own benchmark runs, and ran a signature block listing whatever was in the case under their desk. Taiwan's was Mobile My Life, usually written MML, opened on 22 October 2002 and run by a small outfit called 上川電子科技有限公司. Taiwan had a particular claim on the category, since a lot of the hardware being discussed was assembled about an hour from the people discussing it.

The counter at the bottom of the front page is the only membership figure the site ever published, and in January 2010 it read 1,174,811 registered members against 1,902,832 posts. That ratio is the first thing worth noticing. A million accounts producing under two million posts means the overwhelming majority of them registered, read, and never wrote anything, which is what a popular forum actually looks like once it is big enough to be a search result.

The same page tracked peak concurrency, and that number was going the wrong way for years before anything visibly broke. The record was 1,374 people at once, set on New Year's Day 2006. Four years later the figure being displayed was 182.

~ the record ~

~ the pivot ~

On 13 September 2012, at 19:40, the staff posted an announcement. MML was going to stop being a 3C forum and start being a women's fashion magazine, keeping the three letters and giving them a new meaning: Miss Modern Look, 摩登美人. The last front page carrying hardware discussion is dated 19 September 2012. The first front page carrying the magazine went up on 22 October 2012, which was the forum's tenth birthday, to the day.

Whether that date was chosen or just fell there is not recorded anywhere. Either way it reads oddly: a ten-year-old community swapped for a different product on the exact anniversary of its founding.

~ the crash ~

The magazine ran for three more years with the old forum still attached underneath, which is how the ending got its specific flavor. The archive's last working capture is dated 25 October 2015, 02:02. The next one, 20 November 2015 at 23:18, returns this instead of a page: Table './mml_20110323/YiiSession' is marked as crashed and should be repaired. Every URL on the domain served that same line, and kept serving it into 2016.

The useful detail is the database name sitting inside the error. It reads mml_20110323, a date stamp from March 2011, so the schema that finally gave out had been carried forward unchanged from before the pivot. And the table that broke was YiiSession, which stores login sessions rather than posts. Thirteen years of hardware argument were probably still sitting intact on that disk, unreachable because the part that tracked who was logged in had corrupted.

~ the turkish one ~

Mine was donanimhaber, and later frmtr, and I was one of the people with a hardware list in the signature. So I can read this grave from eight thousand kilometers away without knowing the language: I cannot make out a word of the posts, but I know exactly what the pages were for and roughly what the arguments were about. These forums were built independently in dozens of countries and arrived at nearly identical layouts, because the problem they were solving was identical. Donanimhaber is still running. MML got a fashion magazine and then a corrupt table.

mml.com.tw answers today under the name of a Taiwanese management consultancy, 德普斯管理顧問有限公司. Different company, recycled domain, no connection to the forum.

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