SNews to close

[BR16ADE_R055E]

:(

[Heston]

[Flex]

I'm a little surprised the Clash/Joe/Bad/etc. aren't really big enough to sustain more than one regularly active message board.

[Heston]

I'm a little surprised the Clash/Joe/Bad/etc. aren't really big enough to sustain more than one regularly active message board.

I blame Facebook.

[Flex]

I blame Facebook.

You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society.

[Heston]

I blame Facebook.

You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society.

Lolz.

[Inder]

:(

[Rat Patrol]

I'm a little surprised the Clash/Joe/Bad/etc. aren't really big enough to sustain more than one regularly active message board.

They are. There's been more than one board since the mid/late-90's, back when Clashiverse was in its greatest-ever drought. Yeah, for a little while during the Joe renaissance there were 5 or 6 active boards, but that was Usenet getting hosed and it affected every topic under the sun that had an alt. group until things settled out. What keeps a community active is the community. And Snews has been on a death spiral for over 4 years now because of its leadership's indifference to the community. Things were just fine there until about 2007, and the crossover from here and there was totally fluid (that link on the homepage that's been there for eons was put there for our benefit). Want a little more DCT and snark...come here. Want a lighter touch with a little more positivity...go there. Or switch flavors based on what mood you're in this week. Or occupy permanent space at both, if you look at their all-time posting leaders. These boards were totally complementary. Any perceived rivalry was horseplay. Or unicornplay. And for a couple years that was the more active of the two boards.

Things changed when that whole Cult of Widowing thing started getting encouraged to the hilt to rope in all the newbies. You had a very green audience of kids--many of them underage and too young to have any concept of Joe when the Meskies were still active coming in attracted by the emo of worshiping a fallen hero. It became a Kurt Cobain-template thing. Yeah, I guess some people got turned on to Joe's music. But really...did you see the teenage girl contingent talking all that regularly about the music? Not really. It was all about the tragedy of a kind soul being lost too early. Worshipping the dead. It was kind of creepy. And didn't sit well that the leaders of the flock were encouraging this, tacitly steering this, and implicitly seeing it as a growth strategy. Longtimers were leaving, segregating themselves, or losing interest before the Great IMCT Crash of '08 sent the refugees over and amped up the crossover posters to temporary full-time status. The exile era was marked by just how little intermixing there was between groups. Tami and Eleanor were long AWOL by this point, barely logging in more than every couple of months and never posting. That naive Death Cult went adrift into strange territory when that steering presence disappeared, and then we have things happening like the unsettling Clash Kids' blowup. Hell, that was Inder, the erstwhile third moderator, who had to step in to that uncomfortable situation...out of his regular jurisdiction...to try to be the adult in the room. It didn't work. There was nobody there to speak for the site.

It decayed from there. Regulars left. And the newbies eventually lost interest and went for Facebook when that veteran presence that got them comfortable there vanished into a vacuum. The site started crashing. The code got buggy. Nobody fixed it. The traffic dwindled. It dropped out of Google results. The code got buggier. Hell...I thought the board registration expired Dec. 31 because it was offline with some database error for all of New Year's Day. And if you clicked on the memberlist it showed that Tami had not logged in once since the Spring. Boards die when the sense of community dies. Don't mistake that for strict vs. laissez faire moderation. This place is celebrating its 10th anniversary on a high note, with traffic at an all-time high and noticeable uptick in new-regs because Inder still cares. And because we're still invested in community for community's sake. It's about the GNDA, not the DCT.

I may have given the unicorns my fair share of snark over the years, but I feel terrible about this. They got drawn down a side path, then the community leaders disappeared and they were adrift and discombobulated. I feel terrible for the few die-hards who cared enough to keep it going, keep trying to get some threads started, keep posting and promoting the tribute concerts and spotter reports. They knew the end was coming, and stuck it out till the lights went out. I've done that myself on other old boards before. It's not a good feeling, but when you're loyal you'd rather the board leave you than you leave the board. It couldn't have felt good when 12/22/11 came and there were no posts for almost 2 weeks. I hope they find a welcoming home over here and that there's no hesitation to jump in. It's going to be a very active year for Joe, for B.A.D., for this community because of all the anniversaries and all the fresh material. And I hope if any of the former newbies who were put off by us come here that they get a warm welcome.

And I don't mean to bag too hard on Tami, but she's been in a very different place in life for a long time and that hasn't included shepherding her flock. It would've been nobler to call it a day before things decayed this bad than to just disappear. I think that's unfortunate. It deserved a more dignified end.


Now...somebody want to put in a notice to Web Archive to mirror all the site content before it's gone? Or get their own site crawler to comb it (they do have those)? This is a resource that needs to be preserved for posterity.

[Silent Majority]

Excellent post, RP. Anyone from Snews is welcome here, I'm sure.

[daredevil]

I'm sorry to see it go. I thought it was good message board.

[BR16ADE_R055E]

In case anyone hasn't read Tami's message:

Hello All,

It is with some sadness that I am writing to tell you all about the shut down of this message board and eventual shut down of the website. We've been going since December 2001, just over ten years, something which I am immensely proud of!

You have all contributed in various ways to this community. For nostalgia's sake I have created a Facebook page for the "Strummernews.com Community" which can be located on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/Strummernews

Please feel free to contact your old SNews Message Board friends over there.

The website archives themselves will be kindly taken over by the Strummerville Charity who will have a new section on their website for the tenth anniversary of Joe's passing called "Forever Strummer". Once the archives have been transferred, Strummernews.com will be shut down for good.

I am really proud of the community we created here, despite the occasional ups and downs. I can only apologise for my absence of the last few years as I have gone through a divorce and moved back to the States (Brooklyn!) I just read that St. Ann's Warehouse where Joe played the 5 night stand in April '02 is closing down - and I suppose everything must pass eventually.

If you think about it, the tributes that poured in after Joe's death and that were posted, first manually by myself and then through a PHP page that Inder created was a very early version of Twitter. They were literally pouring in by the minute and being copied and pasted to the site and uploaded as quickly as possible.

Every one of those 50,000+ tributes was then copied and printed and put into a book and sent to Joe's widow Lucinda and now sits at Joe's place in Somerset, UK. It is lovingly called "the phone book" by friends and family who stop by to read the thousands of tributes sent in by the fans. I always thought that was one of our greatest accomplishments as a community. And all of you helped make that possible.

Luce told me personally how much it meant to her to see the outpouring of love in the wake of Joe's death and when it comes down to it, providing comfort to his family at their time of sorrow is the most tremendous gift any fan could give back to someone who changed their life.

Love and Respect,

The Web Princess

[Marky Dread]

...but why waste time on The Clash?

[101Walterton]

...but why waste time on The Clash?

Drinking unicorn blood gives you eternal life, you gotta do something to pass the time

[tepista]

Excellent post, RP. Anyone from Snews is welcome here, I'm sure.

I'm sorry to see it go. I thought it was good message board.

yes and yes

[Safe European Home]

HEAR COME THE UNICORN REFUGEES!!!!!