Taiwan Forum

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

~ the eulogy ~

Taiwan Forum opened on 16 March 2004 at twbbs.tw, run by 數字科技, a Taipei company. The abbreviation in the address is the tell: TWBBS, Taiwan Bulletin Board System. Taiwanese internet culture had been built inside telnet BBS servers run out of university computing centers, PTT being the famous survivor, and Taiwan Forum was an attempt to carry that shape onto the web where you did not need a terminal client to join in.

It worked. Registration was optional for reading, and over a million accounts were created over its life, which made it the largest web forum on the island. The wordmark on the header was the site name beside the URL, with a line under it about sharing a happy network life. Boards covered everything a general forum covers, and two of them covered films and BitTorrent downloads, which is where the trouble lived for the whole eight years.

It was also where Taiwanese internet arguments happened. In 2007 the forum's ACG community went after a variety program for the way it characterized light novels. In 2008 it was the venue for a plagiarism row involving the novelist Jiu Ba Dao. Past a certain size a general forum turns into the room where a country holds its online arguments, and Taiwan Forum was well past that size.

~ the dossier ~

~ the raid ~

In 2005 the Motion Picture and Video Copyright Protection Foundation of the Republic of China filed a criminal complaint with police over BitTorrent seeds hosted in the movie and download boards. On 18 December 2005 the Taipei District Prosecutors Office seized the site's servers in Neihu, and the administrator, Chen Yi-chi, was taken in for questioning. The forum came back in early 2006 after the authorities returned part of the data they had taken, which is an unusually soft landing for a site whose machines have been carried out of a building, and it bought Taiwan Forum another six and a half years.

~ how it wound down ~

The second round was slower and it finished the job. On 4 June 2012 the Music and Entertainment section was closed after a copyright complaint from MUST, the Chinese music copyright society in Taiwan. On 27 July new member registration was halted. On 1 September management announced that functions would be suspended by 1 October, telling users to download and save anything they wanted to keep. On 29 September posting and replying were switched off. The servers came down on 30 November 2012.

Copyright was the proximate cause and it is the one that made the newspapers, but the Liberty Times report on the closure put the other reason plainly: Facebook had arrived, page views were falling and members were leaving. A general-purpose forum was competing against a thing that did the same job with your real name attached and your classmates already on it.

~ the inheritance ~

www.twbbs.tw does not resolve. The closest neighbor address, twbbs.net.tw, now answers with a redirect to a Taiwanese casino bonus site, which is the ordinary fate of a domain with eight years of inbound links pointing at it.

My own forum years ran on donanimhaber and frmtr, in Turkish, where the signature block under every post was a list of your hardware and the argument was usually about somebody's power supply. Taiwan Forum is the same object built on a different island, with the same board structure and the same problem of a music section that the rights holders could see from across the room. The Turkish ones mostly survived. This one had servers carried out of a building in Neihu and then Facebook, and it did not.

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