h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

(The quick version, because it's late)

The Digital Village released Starship Titanic in the first half of 1999, but the promotional website opened for business a year earlier. Back then, it was a teaser set in the game universe, promoting tours on the ship. It was written by the brilliantly inventive Michael Bywater (with extra bits by Neil Richards, Alison Humphrey and myself) and was very very funny. (Alison was the producer. Extra design and graphics by Cynthia Miall, Oscar Chichoni and John Attard. I was the main web techie, and Claudio Calvelli was the sysadmin.)

ANYWAY.

THe website allowed you to register, recording your name, email address and favourite breed of frog. After a while, we sent a mail with the address and password of the Starlight Lines intranet, followed immediately by a mail saying that the previous mail was sent in error and should be discarded immediately and that ON NO ACCOUNT should you visit the intranet.

It worked brilliantly. And the intranet had lots more funny stuff by Michael. (My personal favourites are the engineering reports about the Succ-u-bus and Barbot) It also had the Employee Forum.

I should specify here that the Employee Forum, as everyone who's ever used it knows, is buried ten pages into the site. It took about half a day to code the simplest forum I've ever written. It had barely any functionality at all.

We released it and forgot about it.

After a while, we went back and had a look, and boggled.
We hurriedly left again.

In the three years since the launch, there have been approximately 34,000 messages posted to the forum. You do the maths. It's nuts. But that's what happens with communities. I've told the story of the Employee Forum at talks I gave about community at the ICA and UCL. It's a fantastic illustration of how communities and cultures can evolve like fungus (in a good way) in the places where you least expect them, become their own little worlds with their own little fictions.

They may be nutters, but I like them. I don't take part in the forum, but I did step in when The Digital Village sold up - those lovely folks at the Flirble organisation helped me give the intranet a new home, and I fixed a couple of bugs and added a feature or two (such as Blerontin time and date on the postings - the code for this is out on the web somewhere if you look hard enough) One day soon I hope to rescue the Starship Titanic site as well, though probably without that forum.

-- Yoz

Your support, Yoz, has ertainly been appreciated, and I have derived massive enjoyment from my time at the Forum - which extends from starting to read at post 800 and starting to post at the forum around 1,700 as the Chief Steward Dirigible St. John-Joop.

It's hard to get across the full magnificence of the storyline, as you genuinely have to read it. There have been lulls and quiet moments, but when the Forum got hopping, it got hopping good. There have been a plethora of plots - only a few of which I have managed to capture here - a few of them deeply considered offsite, but most sprouting spontaneously from the main players.

My personal favourite will always be wedding of UPIG and Goblin which had a solid run up of a good week or two of bacholar parties and wedding nerves and ended up with a fist fight between at least three priests and the presence of most of the common posters at the time for the whole evening.

Another aspect as been the numbers - there's always a competition or rush to reach a specific thousand - of which there have obviously been many. The biggest rushes have been for 10,000, 20,000 and 30,000 - all of which resulted in at least 50 to 100 posts in the space of a minute or two. Frightening, but thoroughly entertaining to take part in.

Thanks to the tech people and Douglas.

The Apprentice