My first encounter with the mainstream online Transformers fandom occurred over the summer between my eighth grade year of middle school and my freshman year of high school. I had a history prior to this in the fandom, but right now that is of little consequence. Suffice it to say that I already possessed a keen knowledge of the fandom, as well as a desire to learn more.
Over the course of the summer, I befriended a great many fellow Transfans. Aerosurge, Phil Bond, Orange, Machina, Astrotrain, Grimlock, Jazz, Blurr, and several others were among my best friends, and together on Benson Yee's discussion board we addressed a subject dear to a great many in the fandom: how to revive the G1 characters in new, more poseable toys with all of the great things that we never got to see in the original toys. In the end, a petition was created for the purpose of mustering the collective will of the fandom to convince Hasbro that releasing new toys would be a good thing for their corporation.
Looking back on it, the entire venture seems somewhat naïve. How could a mere handful of fans, many of us not even out of high school, convince a giant corporation to answer our call for new toy models of G1 characters. Perhaps it was foolish, but all I will say now is that worse things have been tried in the history of our fandom. A key problem, however, was gaining enough support from within a disunified fandom to make the petition effort a universal one. Using Bottalk's CTLP, we sought to unify the entire fandom (then estimated at around 10,000 online fans) under a common platform. Unfortunately, we failed to realize that bitterness and rivalries had preceded our arrival in Transfandom.
The political state of Transfandom in of itself is truly worth noting from a sociological perspective, as it provides about the clearest look anyone is going to get at what it was like in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire or in India prior to the establishment of the British colonial authorities. In other words: electronic feudalism. A rather elaborate hierarchy existed between the various power brokers, with webmasters repeatedly bowing to the pressure of organized flame campaigns. Power was rather haphazardly distributed between a number of factions that were housed at various discussion boards (the equivalent of a medieval castle), with the board administrators often members of the ruling factions of each particular board. Interestingly, the local strongmen were not simply uneducated brutes pulled off of the street but rather well-educated and articulate speakers who possessed considerable powers of intimidation and (when attempts at coercing dissidents failed) flame prowess. The classic Marxist class warfare also existed, with the "regulars" (Bigbot, Axalon Underground, BWTF, et al) against the "elitists" (the ATT and other newsgroups). It was this class conflict in particular that proved to be a direct obstacle to our efforts for unification.
Several months prior to my arrival at BWTF, a huge flame war had been fought on BWTF and Bigbot over Benson Yee's stated intent to create a website for the Animorphs toyline (tantamount to treason in the eyes of a great many regulars). After two weeks of heavy flaming, Benson retracted his intent and an uneasy truce was more or less enforced, abeit with rivalries still simmering on both sides. Herein lies the difference between flame wars and real wars: in real warfare, the civilian death toll and the problems of occupation and consolidation act to restrain both sides' bloodlust. On the Internet, no such restraint exists, and as such hatreds can go on for years long after the original cause has been forgotten. Such is the case with the Animorph War.
In an attempt to increase the petition's influence within the fandom, several members of the petition committee joined the Transfan Triumvirate, one of the dozens of Internet Transfan parastates under the leadership of the ambitious Trium Shockwave. With the assistance of his deputy, Trium Xaaron, Shockwave agreed to suspend animosity against Benson Yee in hopes of getting the petition rolling. Blurr, the informal leader of the petition committee, created the Yahoo! club Moon Base 2 (which would, over the course of time, become more or less merged with the TF Triumvirate) to act as the central coordination center for the committee.
The Triumvirate, however, had enemies of its own. A real-life nemesis of Trium Xaaron and alleged disgruntled member of the Cult of Zarak (at that time the most powerful of the Transfan parastates) calling himself Ruckus enlisted the aid of two hacker associates, Uproar and Havoc, declared "war" on the Triumvirate and Moon Base 2. Over the course of the summer, the BWTF board was subjected to wave after wave of spam, impersonations, and flaming, as well as several E-Mailed viruses (one of which I unfortunately received) as Ruckus (sometimes calling himself Ahriman) and his organization, the Sons of Chaos, sought to demolish the Triumvirate and Moon Base 2. In the end, a rough truce was negotiated and Ruckus remained on the board as a semi-regular poster.
By the end of the Hell's Hacker/Sons of Chaos War (as the event was variously called), the founders of Moon Base 2 discovered that our actions against Ruckus had gained us widespread recognition throughout Transfandom. After Blurr abdicated most the responsibilities of running Moon Base 2 to myself and Aerosurge in order to return to college (he eventually faded away altogether, like so many other TF fans), the two of us worked to establish ties with Beastmachines2.com, Jason's board, and the Axalon Underground (which was more or less under the control of the Zaraks at this point) in hopes of continuing to gain support for the petition.
When it was announced that Bigbot would host the official Beast Machines forum for series writer Bob Skir, we had high hopes for the new series as spoilers from the showing of the first episode at BotCon were passed along across the Internet. After creating our own online newsletter, The Matrix, we recognized that Moon Base 2 had to establish a strong presence on Bigbot as soon as possible, before the other Transfan parastates arrived and staked out their "turf" in much the same style of as inner city gangs or the European colonists in the New World. As the chief reviewer for The Matrix, I helped to establish a positive outlook for the early episodes of Beast Machines in addition to acting as Moon Base 2's chief ideologue and recruiter on Bigbot's new forum, known as Bottalk. Within several weeks, Moon Base 2's leadership had soared from 15 to 130, with roughly 50 new hard-core members. Our new members spread the idea of the petition across Transfandom, visited toy conventions, and recruited local friends to keep spreading the word. The entire committee was greatly impressed with the surge in membership and thanks to Aerosurge and Machina's work, The Matrix's site counter continued to soar.
The initial plan had been use what I call "the Mormon approach" to spreading the petition. Regardless of what the reader may think of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints, the fact of the matter is that they have an outstanding program for disseminating their teachings, which is one of the reasons why they now have a worldwide membership of about 15,000,000. Theological issues aside, if something is heard frequently and consistently, it is very likely that somebody is going to believe it. My plan was to continue the vigorous recruiting program, convince the fandom's various parastates that the plan was in their best interests, and to gradually spread into the newsgroups, which I knew would be extremely difficult to overcome due to their general skepticism towards the effectiveness of the petition.
That was the plan, at least. But all of it was based on the assumption that Beast Machines would maintain the same support from the fandom that Beast Wars had enjoyed during its three year run. Sure, there were already a small party of outspoken critics of the new series, but I figured that the criticisms would gradually die down as the series progressed and writers rationalized events with a reasonable degree of intelligence (this, in my mind, was the entire purpose of Bob Skir's FAQ). Sadly, this did not occur.
The primary reason for this is the fact that Bob Skir's patron Transfan was none other than Renaud Thierry Lefebvre. An extremely unscrupulous individual, he and his resident strongmen had originally been content to sit back and reap praise for the brilliance of the new series. When this did not occur, they were shocked and in complete disarray. As criticism of the new series continued to mount, Renaud was more determined than ever to retain control of his fiefdom. As a result, he began ordering new, more authoritarian policies designed to keep his critics (and Skir's) in check.
Renaud had several reasons (at least in his own mind) to be worried. The first was that a YTV employee under the handle of Shockwave who had access to future episodes of the series was regularly posting spoilers on Bottalk, granting him a pseudo-prophetic status among most of the board's population, which had by now well exceeded 2,000. In an effort to keep Shockwave in check, Renaud manuevered one of his subordinates, Galvatron Decepaticon, into a flame war with the spoiler in hopes of discrediting him to the masses. When that effort failed, Renaud decided to take a different approach to ridding himself of a potential opposition leader.
The second reason for his concern was the formation of Dewtropolis. Originally a webclan of link-minded individuals that grew up on Bottalk's main discussion forum, the Dewtropolites were little more than a harmless group of young adults trying to have some fun. Nevertheless, their discussions were frequently overshadowing those of the new series, and as a result Renaud decided that they had to go. The sensible approach would have been to create a new forum for the webclan and retain what could have potentially been a loyal group of board supporters (much as the Allspark later did with Beast Mayhem), but Renaud was not in the mood to be reasonable. Instead, he suspended board activities for several hours, liquidated roughly 300 Dewtropolites and Skir critics, and then resumed business as usual.
One of the great truisms of online "warfare" is that, unless you are a hacker, there can never be an ultimate victory over an enemy. You can ban them, true, but this does nothing to silence their opinion. Ultimately, all you can do is make it harder for them to get their message out. Such was the case of the Dewtropolites, who proceeded to form the Ezboard community of Dewtropolis and were shortly joined by 100 additional Bottalk exiles who left in protest of Renaud's strong-arm tactics. For a short time, a brief period of harmony continued between the two boards as users who posted on both boards debated the proper course of action. After Dewtropolite leader Charon attempted to request an explanation for the Bottalk administration's actions, he discovered that the request was promptly deleted. Similar calls for an explanation were likewise deleted, and thus an otherwise happy band of Transfans felt that they had been slighted by Bottalk, creating the nucleus for an animosity that would continue over the next several years.
My own role in these events was somewhat marginal. I had never taken part in Dewtropolis, initially viewing the webclan as a somewhat pedestrian venture. All the same, I could understand the frustration and the anger that the Dewtropolites felt. In an online conference held shortly thereafter, the Moon Base 2 founders voted unanimously to cease all attempts to negotiate with Bigbot concerning the petition until some kind of explanation was provided for the mass banning of the Dewtropolites. While Aerosurge continued to supervise the production of The Matrix, I found that more and more of my time was being spent at Bottalk, where I took part in discussion regarding the new series in addition to being Moon Base 2's chief representative to the board.
Beast Machines in of itself was still widely accepted in the early days, prior to all the talk of Cybertron's "original organic state." While I didn't much care for Skir's anti-technological outlook, the series provided a fairly intriguing plot, though I felt at times that the writing team went out of its way to alienate older fans. For example, would it really have hurt Skir's storyline to say that Nightscream's companion in "Forbidden Fruit" was Soundwave? While I initially had a very optimistic outlook on the show, after reading several in-depth criticisms of the series by the Zarak leadership of the Axalon Underground, I came to realize exactly why so many fans had so many problems with the series. Towards the end of the first season, I pretty much made my determination that the ending of the series was going to be a bad one so long as they kept the technology/organic conflict going.
In any event, Shockwave the Spoiler followed the exiles to Dewtropolis, but after several weeks of trying it was determined by various members of the board that the Dewtropolites had primarily established their community to serve as a webclan with a little Transformers on the side. In an effort to accommodate those who wanted some serious Transformers discussion, Optimus87 (an associate of mine that I had met over the summer on Jason's board) and Shockwave created the Allspark to serve as a replacement for Bottalk.
In the beginning, the Allspark simply had two forums: one for Transformers discussion, the other, known as Beast Mayhem, for all kinds of comedic fun. Beginning with a small nucleus of about 100 posters, Optimus87 and Shockwave strove to obtain the most outstanding administrative staff for their board. In addition to themselves, the Council of Elders (the Allspark administrators) included RodPrime (former leader of the Brotherhood of Prime, a Transfan parastate aimed at uniting the fandom), Maximal General Proudwolf (another advocate of Transfan unification who had recently joined Moon Base 2 as an honorary founder), and Rumble (an outspoken critic of the Cult of Zarak with ties to the new parastate ofTransformers Extreme). When I was told that I was to be inducted into the Council, I was both flattered and more than a little nervous at the same time.
My experience as a founder of Moon Base 2 was largely limited to a small but relatively close-knit group of people I had all known as friends over the summer before we became co-workers. As a result, most of the upper echelons of Moon Base 2 were fairly constant and disagreements were relatively minor as we all agreed on the primary goal: promotion of the petition to revive G1.
Helping to run the Allspark, however, was an extremely different situation. Here I would be helping to run the equivalent of a parastate, help to settle disputes, manage money, determine what was/was not appropriate, and deal with trolls who got out of hand. A lot of people seem to think only of the power aspect when they think of an Ezboard administrator (abeit that any concept of "power" and "territory" is a rather nebulous one at best over the Internet), but in reality it's a really thankless job. Additionally, the primary job of an admin is often not to set policy or determine who's right and who's wrong, the primary job of an admin is to "answer your mail" and keep the board running smoothly. Anything you succeed at will never be praised, but in the event you fail your opponents (and there will always be some in at least one of these four categories: trolls, agitators, people with legitimate disagreements with what you're doing, and people who would like nothing better than to have the job you do) will be sure to take advantage of it.
Still, I thought (rather stupidly, now that I reflect on it) that it would be kind of fun, so I contacted Optimus87 and informed him that I would take up his offer to become an admin.
If I would have known beforehand how things turned out, I think I would have been far better to decline.
