#59769, posted 10-25-03 03:48 AM            

The Prodigy Bulletin Boards.

Only a few other large groups of managed online communities of comparable quality ever existed beside the Prodigy BBs. Such as those of GEnie. And those of Compuserve. There were also the communities of BIX, but they mainly catered to CalTech/MIT engineering types. That was it. Delphi's forums aspired to be among the best in online communities, but just couldn't quite make it. And AOL's boards? Let's just say as far as quality of communities have been concerned, AOL has always been really out of the picture altogether.

It was 15 years ago, in 1988, when the Prodigy communities came into existence, as Classic first opened its doors in a few test markets across the country; the reach of the BB communities finally became truly nationwide in 1990 with the completion of Prodigy's quite unique access network.

Actually those of you who go far enough back as Prodigy members will recall that the BBs did not actually start out that well in the earliest years. The prior-to-posting censorship system dubbed "Cato" very certainly did not exactly prove popular. Also what did not help was the rather limited format where BB notes had only 6 lines of text per page with 40 character widths--which shared space with ads at the bottom.

But by around 1993, Cato had finally become history. Also the BB note format got much improved with the doubling of lines of text per page to 12--with the elimination of advertising; the text widths got increased to 60. Only then could the Prodigy BBs become truly great communities. And truly great they indeed became. Including Member Help right here.

But then late in the 90s came a serious decline in BB membership. To counter this ominous trend, the BBs once again became free of hourly charges.

However the year 1999 arrived. With it came the notorious Y2K bug. For Prodigy Classic, this bug proved very fatal indeed.

Though the successor Prodigy Internet service had been started back in about 1996 as a pure HTML-based ISP service, it was hardly ready to accept the Prodigy communities from the doomed Classic at the beginning of 1999.

For PI had just the Excite message boards (associated with Prodigy in some sort of an agreement), & the Prodigy newsgroups. Asking the Classic membership to migrate to either would have been just like the present situation of asking the entire membership to migrate to Yahoo Groups. Guess what would have happened then if nothing was done to change such a bad situation?

Fortunately, the PI communities--based on the UBB off-the-shelf message board software--were established instead. But while this saved the Prodigy communities from disappearing altogether, still a clear majority of Classic members left Prodigy for elsewhere rather than migrate to PI in October of 1999 when Classic shut down for good.

Out of some 200 Classic BBs in late 1998, PI only got 40+ communities out of that by the end of 1999. And the number of PI communities never changed very much... until June of this year... with the reduction to just 18 communities.

Now all the BB URLs with the exception of Member Help have been redirected to Yahoo Groups as of yesterday. Nearly all the membership has scattered in a diaspora to such venues as Yahoo Groups itself, MSN Groups, EZ Boards, Delphi Forums, Aantares, the Gun Zone, RootsWeb, & Compuserve Forums.

So after 15 years you might say that Prodigy has finally ceased to exist as one of the best set of online communities ever... as of yesterday the 24th.

I request that every single one of you reading this reply in some way to show your support for what Prodigy "community" meant for you. If you can think of nothing to say, I suggest replying with this:

The "4" not only stands for the word "for" as in "For Prodigy", but also it represents a part of the Prodigy star; if you look closely at the printed Prodigy star, you can see a "4" within its lines.

You all might consider this a final salute to the now late Prodigy communities.

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Wayne_Habberstad__using_the_Arachne_(Czech)_DOS_browser_1.70

Prodigy Classic member 1993-1999