OneHallyu

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

~ the last words ~

K-pop reached Turkey, eventually. There is a real fandom here now and there was a smaller one by the mid 2010s. But the English-language forum layer of that world, the one where international fans argued about chart positions at three in the morning, ran on a set of sites I never opened. OneHallyu was the biggest of them.

It appears in the Internet Archive on 6 May 2013 as a running forum, already with threads, which means it started somewhere earlier that year. The software was Invision Community, the same commercial forum package that ran a good part of the 2010s web, and the board used the parts of it most forums ignore: a points currency, a shop to spend it in, a bank to hold it, and a top-members leaderboard.

The name is the giveaway about scope. Hallyu is the Korean word for the cultural export wave, and OneHallyu covered the wave rather than one act. There were separate forum groups for Korean music, Chinese music and television, Japanese music, Hollywood, current news, fan fiction, and graphics. It was a general Asian-pop forum that happened to be dominated by K-pop because K-pop was what the internet showed up for.

~ the record ~

~ the scale of it ~

The last crawl of the front page before it went dark still carries the post counts, and the shape of them says more than the total would. The Music forum held 8.2 million posts. The next biggest room on the whole board was Random, the off-topic one, at 887,400, with Movies and Television on 550,500 and Celebrity News and Gossip on 525,400 behind it.

So the subject the site existed for out-posted its own second-place room nine times over, and the second-place room was people talking about anything else. That is the normal shape of a single-interest community that got big enough to need somewhere to go when the interest ran out for the evening.

~ the last week ~

A banner went across the top of every page: "OneHallyu will be shutting down Dec. 25th. The forums are Read-Only." It linked to a thread called "OneHallyu Will Be Closing at the End of 2023." The read-only switch came on 20 December, five days before the stated date, so the last week of a ten-year forum was a week of people reading their own old posts and being unable to reply to them.

Christmas Day was the announced end and the pages kept rendering for a while after it. The Internet Archive has the front page answering normally as late as 26 December. Then the crawls stop. When the domain turns up again on 4 January 2024 it is serving nothing but small redirects, and it has not had a forum behind it since.

Nobody published a reason. Ten years of a site that logged what an entire global fandom thought about itself, hour by hour, closed with a one-line banner and a date, and the only accounts of why come from people guessing on other forums.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »