UOL Forums

» see forum.uol.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Somewhere between 19:47 UTC on 30 October 2018 and 18:24 the following evening, a gray banner appeared across the top of four Brazilian message boards. O Fórum UOL está em processo de desativação. It then gave two dates, which is more than most shutdown notices manage. On 3 December the forum would switch to read-only, with no new topics and no new replies. Complete deactivation would happen on 7 January 2019.

The last line of the banner did something notices rarely do, which is state the stakes rather than apologize for them. Este fórum fez parte da história de gerações de brasileiros. This forum was part of the history of generations of Brazilians. Then it thanked everyone who had posted.

Four boards ran underneath it: Jogos, Esporte, Televisão and Tecnologia, plus a separate beta version of Jogos that carried different content from the main one. They shared a thread numbering scheme and a piece of custom forum software that UOL never used anywhere else. By the end the front page was advertising 7,429,702 threads and 179,927,292 posts, with press coverage putting registered accounts near a million.

UOL's own account of why was unsentimental. A long and gradual process of losing users, on a product that had been very successful in another era of the internet. Adapting it for a broader audience would cost money it would not get back. No scandal and no lawsuit. A portal looked at an eighteen-year-old board and could not write a sentence explaining what it was still for.

~ the chronicle ~

~ vale-tudo ~

The subforum that people actually mourned was not about games. Vale-Tudo was the Jogos board's anything-goes section, and its unofficial motto was entre se quiser, saia se puder: come in if you want, leave if you can. Brazilian writers covering the closure treated it as a vanguard rather than a side room, the place where a chunk of Portuguese-language internet humor was manufactured before anyone had a word for memes.

The rest of it was the ordinary archaeology a long-running board accumulates. The Museu do Videogame subforum finished with 7,515 topics and 212,192 posts, an amateur hardware museum assembled by people typing into a portal's free software.

~ the day the dns changed ~

ArchiveTeam started a grab and ran out of calendar. When the DNS records were switched on 7 January around 18:00 UTC, roughly 40 percent of the forum had been pulled. That would normally be the end of it.

It was not, because the server stayed up behind the dead name. The machine kept answering for another week and was only switched off on 14 January, shortly before 13:00 UTC, by which point the grab was at 99 percent. The gap between the public death and the actual power-off is the only reason the thing survives. Out of 1,804,000 items, 1,185 came back dirty, mostly enormous threads of thousands of pages that threw a server error every time they were requested.

~ the counter nobody turned off ~

On 12 January 2019, five days after the forum had officially ceased to exist and two days before the hardware stopped, the thread and post totals on the Jogos page jumped. Inside five minutes they went from 7,429,702 and 179,927,292 to 7,647,006 and 183,364,475. Some batch job somewhere finished a recount of a board nobody could reach.

Those numbers were never quite real anyway. The highest thread IDs topped out around 4.5 million and the post IDs around 78.7 million, less than half of what the front page claimed, and the beta Jogos board only accounted for another 213,000 threads. The forum had been overstating itself for years and then gave itself one last raise on the way out.

~ the same room in two languages ~

I was on the Turkish equivalent of this in the overlapping years, which is donanimhaber and frmtr rather than anything a portal ran, and the house style there was a signature block listing your own hardware under every post you made. The portal-run forum turned up wherever a national ISP got big enough to bolt one on, and Brazil built the largest version of it I have found anywhere. Vale-Tudo and the Turkish off-topic boards were running the same room with different vocabulary, and both of them outlived the thing they were nominally attached to.

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