Mop.com

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

~ the last words ~

In October 1997 a young man in Changsha, signing himself mop, put up a bulletin board about game cheats. China had somewhere under a million people online at the time. The board outgrew the cheats almost immediately and became a general forum, which in the Chinese web of that period meant it became a place where language got made.

In 2004 it was taken over in a share deal by Chen Yizhou's group, later known as Qianxiang Interactive, which two years afterward also picked up the campus network that turned into Renren. Mop bought the tech news site DoNews in December 2005. By April 2007 it was counting 28.685 million users, second among Chinese online communities behind only Tianya, and its golden run of roughly 2005 to 2010 lines up almost exactly with the years China moved off dial-up.

Everything Mop produced was in Chinese, and most of what made it funny depended on characters being pushed into shapes a translation cannot carry. I have read about this board. I could not have read the board.

~ the record ~

~ where the slang came from ~

For about ten years a large share of the words Chinese people used online started on Mop and leaked outward, the way a small town supplies a language with its idioms. Some of it was abbreviation, some of it was deliberate mangling of characters to get past filters, and a lot of it ended up in newspapers written by people who had no idea where it came from. Chinese press coverage of the shutdown kept calling Mop the ancestor of the internet celebrity, which is the closest a headline gets to saying a forum invented a country's online voice.

~ the search that used people ~

Mop is also where the human flesh search got going: a case gets posted, thousands of readers pull at whatever thread they can reach, and inside a week a stranger has a name and an employer and a home address. It was crowdsourced investigation with no brakes on it, and it worked, which was the problem.

Regulators noticed the site for other reasons. On 8 January 2009 Mop was named on a government list of websites requiring rectification, two days after one of its sections had been reported to the illegal-content center. That was survivable. The slow part was users leaving for Weibo and then for phones, which took ten more years and left the forum posting to itself.

~ minesweeper, of all things ~

The notice went up on the front page on 15 April 2021. To prevent the spread of junk information and to build a good network environment, it said, this site will formally close the posting function from 20 April 2021, and we apologize deeply for the inconvenience. By the end of that month the recommended stories on the homepage were more than a month old.

Since then mop.com has been reused. Pull it up today and you get a browser Minesweeper game with a language switcher, sitting on a domain that was a national institution for a decade. Nobody archived the boards.

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