Well, today’s the day. The time has come for me to say a big thank you to Asa, and goodbye. All the best to him, and to everyone else who I look forward to discussing TV presentation and other related topics over on TV Live Forum.
I leave you all with the of the very last episode of a certain police drama.
On 22nd February 2001
TV Forum went on air and began a new era in discussion
As TV Forum enters its new life as a archive site,
it is proud to remind readers of the sustained excellence
achieved by so many of it's talented posters in the last 20 years
Welcome to the final day of TV Forum. We have got so many goodbyes coming in! But let me introduce myself! I was a long-time lurker who just created a account solely for the purpose of saying goodbye! This forum meant so much to me and I am sad to see it go! But at least people will have 59 pages forth of messages to look back on until the servers finally get shut down in like 2029 or something! I will personally miss TV Forum! Lets just hope the TV Live forum lasts for years to come!
Bless, if he were still alive, Peter Sissons would be getting in the neck right now for not wearing a black tie to commemorate the untimely death of TV Forum.
(Porting this now since I don’t know when on March 31st it will close).
So long TVForum a place where there’s repeated and diagrams discussions of whether or not Studio E’s light boxes can change color just because they look brown when off.
Thank you to staff and the online friends I’ve made.
And a shameless plug I know most will move to TVLiveForum but I’m a moderator over TVNewsTalk. We’ve gotten scoops over the years. The forums active but a lot of us are more so on the discord server.
The site's been through endless iterative redesigns yet somehow has never felt "different".
Although I've only ever been a light user, and meta discussions aren't as prominent as TV and news chat, but over the years I can't remember seeing anyone moaning about design or layout changes, or indeed any that have annoyed me. It's just steadily got better.
I know a bit about forum software, but it's years and years since I bothered to look at what TV Forum is running under the hood and how much is/was custom written; it's always been so pleasantly white-label and it's always "just worked".
Perhaps there was one day I remember the site being down for a while? Years ago?
We haven't, to the best of my knowledge, had any major security issues either.
I can't really remember seeing any abusive posts, they're always already cleaned up by the time I looked. If there is spam, it's always removed faster than I can spot it.
The design has had so many pleasant Easter Eggs; I'm sure I didn't discover half of them.
And, most importantly, TV Forum has outlasted
every
other forum or discussion board I can think of, on any topic, and it has felt a very reassuring place to return to again and again over the last 20 years.
Treat it as one of those ITA/IBA/ITC Franchise changes of yesteryear, infuriating yes, but once the chosen replacement is operating smoothly acceptance is given. (All without the loss of the TV Forum 'TVS Archive; too!)
