Weatherzone Forums

» see forum.weatherzone.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Weatherzone began in October 1998 when Mark Hardy, who had been a meteorologist at Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, started selling forecasts on the web. Around 2001 the site put up a discussion board. It ran on UBB.threads, it looked like every other bulletin board of that decade, and it filled up with the people who care about weather more than weather deserves. Storm chasers and snow watchers at the front, and behind them a long tail of men who simply liked arguing about whether the model run was right.

By the end it had 29,947 registered members and 1,529,248 posts in 24,194 threads. For an Australian hobbyist board attached to a mid-sized forecasting company, those are real numbers. A thread about an approaching east coast low would run for hundreds of pages while it was still a smudge on the satellite loop, and the people posting in it were often better at reading that smudge than the broadcast meteorologists were.

On 3 July 2019 a Weatherzone staff member called Todd Baker posted the closing notice. He thanked everyone who had contributed "over the past 18 years" and singled out the moderators, crediting their work with keeping the board alive as long as it was. The post gave a schedule instead of a single date: read-only on 29 July, closed for good on 1 November. The machines actually went dark on 10 or 11 November, a week or so past the stated end.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the owners were doing ~

Hardy owned the whole company until 25 June 2008, when Fairfax Media bought 75 percent and left him with a quarter. The business renamed itself from The Weather Company to Weatherzone on 9 August 2010. Then on 1 October 2019, with the forum already read-only and a month from its announced end, the American firm DTN bought Fairfax's stake. So the board spent its last four months being handed between owners.

Nobody has ever said the sale caused the closure, and the announcement came three months before it. What the timing does show is where a free discussion board sits on the books while a company is being valued, which is under hosting costs and nowhere else.

~ the crawl that would not finish ~

Archive Team went in once the forum was read-only, and the first attempt failed in an interesting way. UBB.threads lets you reach a thread through the ID of any post inside it, so links to the same thread appear everywhere under hundreds of different addresses. The crawler kept fetching every thread as many times as it had posts and never finished.

On 28 October 2019 an archivist working under the handle JustAnotherArchivist ran the job again with a tool called qwarc, restricted to the canonical URL of each thread, and pulled the whole board down cleanly. Two more crawls went back for the images and the outbound links. The result sits on the Internet Archive as a complete copy of every thread, which is more than most forums of that size got.

~ from a long way off ~

Australian weather is not something I have any standing to miss. The seasons run inverted from mine and a cyclone crossing the Queensland coast was never going to reach my browser in Ankara. What travels is the shape of the thing. Every country's internet grew one board where the hobbyists out-read the professionals, and in Turkey it was hardware rather than weather that got mine.

The forums where I spent that attention were donanimhaber and frmtr, and the currency there was a signature block listing your components. You posted your rig the way a Weatherzone member posted their home station readings, and in both cases you were inviting somebody to check your numbers.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »