Jeff Hester

Poking around the intersection of KM and Social Media

Archives for March 2020

Putting BigBlueBall into the WayBackMachine

Putting BigBlueBall into the WayBackMachine

by ·

In my last post, I talked a bit about the history of BigBlueBall.com. For shits and grins, I popped into the WayBackMachine to travel back through time and see what the site looked like “back when.”

Some of the captures on the WayBackMachine are missing a few bits and pieces — some CSS here and and image there — but you’ll get the gist.

1999 – A Web Portfolio

In 1999, this site served as an online portfolio of web projects that Jim Styles and I had worked on. It was hosted on Microsoft IIS with a SQL Server backend to give us flexibility to demonstrate our ASP coding skills.

2001 – Re-launched with a Focus on Instant Messaging

In 2001 the dot-com bubble had burst. The startup I had worked for shuttered. And I repurposed BigBlueBall as an online community supporting instant messaging. We were still running on ASP and using Snitz Forum software to drive the community component.

The site went through a number of redesigns as we tried to get it right. Blue became the prominent color.

2004 An Evolving Design

The interface evolved to a fluid design that could expand to fill the resolution of your screen.

Headlines started to look like headlines. And we migrated from a Microsoft platform to open source PHP and vBulletin forums (which still look frozen in time to this day).

2010 – Migrating to WordPress and bbPress

Fed up with vBulletin being hacked over and over, we migrated to WordPress for the CMS and bbPress for the forums. At this point, the site was pretty quiet, and the forums where a ghost town. Facebook took over the world, or a big chunk of it.

Next up… looking back at the key contributors

Were you a participant or moderator in the BigBlueBall forums back in the day?

Here are a few of the names that stand out (in no particular order):

I want to hear from you. Leave a comment with your BBB username and I will be in touch.

Project: Revival

Project: Revival

by ·

Decades ago (back in the late 90’s) I was looking for a domain name to use for a portfolio website. Of course, even in the late 90s, many of the “good” names were already registered. I ended up going with BigBlueBall.com, as it reminded me of the descriptions of planet Earth as seen from outer space.

In 2001, I repurposed the domain as a public news and discussion forum around the topic of instant messaging. At one point, we had over 40,000 form members discussing AIM, ICQ, Trillian, MSN Messenger and so many more. The website was getting over 500,000 pageviews a month in 2006.

As Facebook and smartphones took off, interest in instant messaging waned. One by one, most of the old instant messaging applications eventually shut down.

And my personal interests shifted more toward being unplugged and outdoors.

In 2010 two things happened that essentially “killed” BigBlueBall.

First, the site was hacked, not just once, but multiple times throughout the year. Specifically, the discussion forums were hacked to redirect to other websites. The first hack was on February 18, 2010. I would undo the hack, repair the website, and it would get hacked again and again. This went on for about a year until finally in early 2011, we migrated to a new system that ended the attacks.

Second, I launched SoCalHiker.net. I was training to thru-hike the 211-mile John Muir Trail (JMT), and redirected my extracurricular energies into sharing my hike guides, JMT planning resources and gear reviews. It fit better with my personal focus and was a whole lot more fun than battling hackers.

BigBlueBall.com pageview analytics
Fairly steady traffic, a dreadful 2010, and slight recovery and a slow crawl to obscurity

The changes I made to BigBlueBall in 2011 resolved the problems we dealt with throughout 2010, but the web traffic never recovered. Interest in messaging had shifted. My interests had shifted. And the organic traffic we had from Google never quite recovered.

Fast forward to 2020

I occasionally get unsolicited offers to buy BigBlueball via email. Most of the time I ignore them, but when I had one pop-up in my inbox last month, it made me think. Maybe I could reinvigorate the website and breath a bit of life back into it.

And so I’m embarking on yet another side project: revitalizing BigBlueBall.com. I’m going to invest four hours per week to see what I can do to turn those pageview statistics around and breathe new life into an old website.

Let’s call it a BigBlueBall Revival.