The long slow death of the BBC’s Message boards
by Martin Belam, February 14, 2013 The imminent closure of The Archers message board on the BBC website is another milestone along the way to the BBC ditching the format altogether.
The BBC have announced that they will be closing the Archers message board, which has been a part of bbc.co.uk for some ten years. Naturally, the users are outraged, although the BBC cites only 1,000 regular users out of the 120,000 visiting the Archers site weekly as one of the factors in the decision. The move has inevitably sparked speculation about what happens to the other remaining message boards on the site.
Over on the Points of View board — where a long time ago I used to be a host — Sue_Aitch (U3336990) pointed out the range of message boards that have disappeared over the years.
Here is how the BBC’s message board directory used to look, with over 100 boards listed:
And here it is now. With three.
In some ways I think that message boards belong to the world of the “accidental community”. As Meg Pickard always explained it, you might all end up on a forum because you love a particular band. After a couple of months of chatting about the band, it emerges that a couple of you also like some similar films. You might never have gone to join a film forum, because it isn’t your main passion, but now a community based around one interest begin to explore their other interests. In that sense the Archers message board also reminds me a little of the old Guardian TalkBoards. With a host of in-jokes and regular “off topic” threads, truly all life is there beyond the show itself. Great fun to join in, and sometimes a vital support line for the members. But is there really a role for mainstream media sites to host these spaces?
In my piece about newspaper website comment threads this week, I referenced the BBC’s principles of the web from 2007, which states that the BBC should:
“Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale”
There is a lot of staff time taken up in managing community spaces. In a Twitter exchange last week, Tom Loosemore suggested that at the height of their popularity in 2003/4, the BBC was spending over £1m a month on moderation of message boards.
It is always difficult for the staff involved when a community space like the Archers is closed. The decision will have been taken well away from the coal-face. Often, though, it is the only couple of people who have been really paying attention to the community who are the people who have to deliver the unwelcome message, and they can become a lightning rod for the anger that users feel.
The coverage of the closure has, of course, veered into inevitable BBC-bashing territory. The word “censor” has been bandied about a lot, and the Mail says that “From next week, critics of the Radio 4 soap will be prevented from posting their views online.”
Well, unless the BBC has also found some way of shutting down every messageboard, blog, forum and comment form on the internet, I rather doubt that it is true. But it does feel like one step closer to the day when the BBC no longer hosts any message boards at all.
Full disclosure: I worked at the BBC between 2000 and 2005. My company Emblem has done consultancy work for the BBC.
by Martin Belam, February 14, 2013 I do live blogging, news stories and quizzes at the Guardian, and help cover Eurovision and Doctor Who for them too. As a journalist and designer I’ve spent over twenty years building digital products for the likes of Sony, the Guardian, the BBC, the Natural History Museum, Arts Council England and Reach (formerly Trinity Mirror). You can contact me at martin.belam@theguardian.com. Sign up to get my blog posts sent to you via email.
It says something about the media’s obsession with the middle-classes that after the closure of many popular BBC message boards (including, say, Doctor Who or EastEnders) is that it takes The Archers to get it into the headlines of the day.
Oddly, the BBC still has 4 childrens’ messageboards around CBBC at http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/mb/ – moderated by a commercial third-party. I can’t really see those closing because there’s a clear public-interest angle in terms of having a pre-moderated message board system that parents can truly trust etc.
Very interesting read, Martin. And great posts this week.
I wonder if the BBC have analysed why “the number of people who contribute actively has dropped below a thousand.” ?
Surely all this begs some questions about message boards in general – what’s their purpose? Did they ever ask ‘why are we setting this up?’ Or, ‘how do measure its success, and recognise failure?’
Citing the reason for closing as “not enough people” is always going to go down like a shit sandwich with those who have become part of that small (but “rich, witty, fun” and important) community.
They should have been more honest.
Martin – reference your quote from the ’2007 web principle’ of “Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them”:
– After 2007 and up to last year or so, the number of BBC blogs increased nearly eight-fold (oh yes, I have a graph), so the notion that the BBC was actually obeying that particular principle is dubious, and at the least questionable. (The official BBC perpetrator of that particular principle was the then Controller of BBC Online, the vacuous and short-lived Seetha Kumar.)
– In the various radio service licences, there is a clause common to most of them, e.g from R4′s licence, “Radio 4 should facilitate and support the growth of communities of interest around its output and enable them to interact with programmes and with each other online.”
That clause doesn’t indicate that the BBC have to host such communities of course, but the key phrases are ‘facilitate and support’ and ‘with each other’, and there is little evidence that the BBC has ever done this, and lots of evidence (viz the closure of the messageboards) that it is intentionally disobeying the spirit of that service licence requirement.
Quite why the BBC should think that an online discussion audience of 120k with 1000 regular posters is too small is beyond me. Many large media concerns would kill for those kind of figures! Admittedly, boards and blogs do cost quite a bit to moderate, but I can’t imagine the current moderation costs are going to be dramatically reduced as a result of chopping the Archers boards, all of which are reactively moderated, and by and large, mature and well-behaved, requiring a minimum of attention.
Btw, the participation figures in the majority of BBC blogs are way below Mustardland proportions.