I’ve been sitting back to see if any other old-timers would field this one and have been surprised that no one besides burra has replied. Maybe part of the reason is that many of the folks who were around when the board started and guided it through its infancy are now gone, or else post rarely. You’re right, Cot7A – before the movie, the board was a more intimate place and seemed to have a broader focus on Middle-earth – its arcane trivia, its geographical and historical nuances, its textual history, and especially its extra-LotR details – as opposed to a more narrow focus on LotR. You had to crack open your Sil, UT, and HoME if you really wanted to keep up.
The site’s membership was small but dedicated, and especially dedicated to a certain tone and style of discussion. Other boards used to flame us for being too intellectual and stuffy (though they usually used more colorful adjectives), but when I first visited, I was immediately impressed by the board’s unique mixture of witty good humor and rigorous intelligence.
When I started out, it took me only a few days of lurking to catch up with most of the posts on the site and get into the groove – back then, it seems, you felt like you really had to have something to contribute before you posted. Newbies would frequently express trepidation in their first posts, wondering if they’d be able to keep up with the high bar set by other posters. Not to give you the wrong idea, though – you’ll never meet a more welcoming bunch than the early members. They showed great patience and restraint with some of my more outlandish theories and speculations.
Trolls with little or nothing to contribute were a seldom-encountered curiosity, and usually soon moved on to more fertile ground. It was easy to keep track of virtually every post that was made back then. The downside was that sometimes whole days would go by without a single post being made in any of the threads you were following. On the upside, you didn’t have to scroll through pages of contentless posts to get to some meat.
Traffic started to increase steadily as the movie’s release approached, and the board’s tone was diluted somewhat – as burra mentioned, the addition of Novices and Newcomers was partly an effort to maintain the board’s intellectual flavor but still accommodate new members who were more interested in fun and conversation than in plumbing the depths of, say, Tolkien’s mythological influences, or whether or not the needs of Khazad-dûm could really have been met by the lone eastern bridge from FotR.
Now, several months and a few thousand new members later, the Downs has clearly changed quite a bit, for better and for worse. New board software without the ezBoard popups = good! Having to sift through dozens of “chatter” posts to get to something interesting = bad. I reckon I’ll refrain from getting into too many details, other than to say that there’s inevitably something lost when you go from a sleepy small-town feel to a bustling boom-town atmosphere. You wonder, who are these people and why is a strip mall going up in place of those trees that my front porch used to look out on? I think it’s the reason why you see some old-timers get cranky. Even if every single one of our 3000+ new members post-movie were an articulate, witty, and thoughtful poster (many, in fact, are), that something, that intimacy, that feeling of being an important part of a small, tight-knit community, whatever you want to call it, would still be gone, or at least diminished.
In terms of style and content of discussion, there are some obvious changes and some that are more subtle. I won’t dwell on the obvious differences for, well, obvious reasons. I’ll just observe that the “serious” discussions these days are different in one way that I’ve noticed. There’s a general trend to discuss Tolkien and his works in more general terms against a wider perspective – Frodo’s grief and how it matches or differs from real-world suffering; Tolkien’s achievement in relation to world literature; how Tolkien’s belief system affected his work, etc. – as opposed to the much more detailed textual debates and analysis of famed threads of yore. That isn’t necessarily better or worse... just different.
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