I read in a blog post on More Than Thornton that the C19 message board is closing! I logged in to C19 and sure enough, there was the announcement from a month ago. Oh man, that truly is the end of an era.
When North & South first aired in the fall of 2004, the BBC message boards famously crashed because of an overwhelming desire of fans to talk about that adaptation and, more specifically, about who the hell that man was who had played John Thornton!
When I first watched North & South myself in the spring of 2006, I too quickly developed a thirst for knowledge about all things Richard Armitage. In my online search I soon came across C19, requested and was granted membership, and my quenching of that thirst could begin, with all the wealth of information right there. I just checked, I registered at C19 back in April of 2006 (under a pseudonym)…
I was mostly a lurker at first, then did comment some, but always stayed in the background in the Richard Armitage sections. I did become more active in other sections for a little while, apparently I have 519 comments/posts to my name, but in time it all just ebbed away and I stopped going there, finding other places and sources of information and, more importantly, I started my own little bubble with this blog.
Over the years, I would on occasion go back to lurk and read up on news and see how people reacted to certain projects. In recent years I have maybe logged in 2-3 times a year and while I hardly ever popped in anymore, it was always nice knowing that C19 was there. Of all the message boards I frequented (there were a few) this one has always been my go-to one. And now it is closing down on November 2nd…
Even though I am sorry for the small community that still goes there, I do understand the decision and I am grateful to those who have put in the hard work of keeping it going all these years. May everyone stay safe, well and happy and continue the fangirling in other places. Thank you for the good times, C19!
Sigh… I joined C19 much later but I feel similar as you do: it had been one of my major sources during the early days of RAddiction for me too.
Times are changing…
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They really are! I’m feeling quite nostalgic…
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Among the most active threads there were the ones about US politics, and I can imagine they didn’t want to deal with moderating the reaction to the election. Uch.
I was a member. I was never very active because I never found my own “culture” there as a fan, but that is a huge loss. Lots of history archived there. At least they are not completely deleting it.
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I never quite got into the message boards world either but, especially in the early days, I spent many hours just reading there. It’s nice to know that it will still be there as an archive for now.
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I heard about that, too, and I think it is a huge loss, even though I was never a member there at all. But I do remember that the board came up in my searches in those first heady days of the obsession with all things RA. (I think I tried to join, but for some reason I never received access to the board. Not sure why.) So even without being impacted by the closure, I am sad because I know what it feels like when a community is shut down – and when the contents that were created over such a long space of time are lost forever.
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Yes, it is sad. Understandable but sad. For now it will be archived, so that’s something.
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