TarBoard- then and now


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Posted by Jock on November 08, 2008 at 12:19:23 user Jock.

Somewhat puzzled by a recent comment to the effect that TarBoard had passed its "sell by" date,
I thought I'd do some amateur research into how does the quality of posts on the new TarBoard square
up with the literary aspirations of TarBoard's founding fathers?

Inspired by allym's recent posts I thought I would try unzipping the first folder of archive messages
and skim through nos 1-50. The task was easier than I thought - of TarBoard's first 50 messages only 24
survive. Perhaps the remaining 26 were full of backslapping laddish vulgarity and were digitally
airbrushed away in order to convey a suitably academic impression of TarBoard to future Internet
archaeologists?

Of the 24 messages that did survive the weeding process the very first is post no. 15 which is about
the latest edition of "Signalling to Mars", an electronic newsletter which preceded TarBoard. The poster,
was David Thewlis.

The next 4 posts are missing. Post 20 is about building a boat like the "Swallow". Ships Biscuits,
a recipe for bunloaf and the smell of the SA books (from Literary Pages pioneer, Tim Johns) take us up
to post 30 with just two posts deleted. Post 31 is about Paul Jennings an Australian children's author,
the next four posts are missing. The typeface used on the cover titles of the Godine editions, a test post
and what 'Titty' was short for (!) takes us upto post 40. Junior TARS and the Bristol TARS AGM, Arthur
Ransome's adventures in Estonia and The Arthur Ransome Slide Show are the new topics that are
introduced in posts 41-50 of which 8 out of the 10 messages survive.

While the recent rebirth of TarBoard has a thread all to itself and inspired some 30 posts, the original
BIRTH of TarBoard appears to have been all but completely ignored by the TarBoard community!

My conclusions: the 'new' TarBoard is not much different to the 'old' TrabOard. If anything the 'new'
is a tad more academic. I hesitate to hazard a guess about those early missing messages, perhaps over
the intervening 12 years Ian has trained us to be better behaved?


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