"And If You'd Like To Contact The Programme..." Pt 1
"...send a stamped, addressed envelope to..."
This post is part of the tenth birthday celebrations of bbc.co.uk. Part Two is here.
It is easy to forget how rapidly email has revolutionised the way that the public interact with organisations like the ´óÏó´«Ã½. I still remember the phone number of Multi-Coloured Swap-Shop, and the postcode of Radio 1 from when I was a kid. Now a good proportion of interaction is done rather more rapidly via SMS and email. :
"Only 10 years ago, radio was a one-way experience, but digital technology has given the radio ears that provide programme-makers with instant feedback. Before they had to rely on getting letters back but now we have chat rooms, message boards, text messaging and e-mail. Programmes can really connect with audiences in a way that 10 years ago they could not".
The recent highlights how real-time this feedback loop is.
The ´óÏó´«Ã½ has often struggled to deal with the sheer volume of correspondence it receives.
One of the things I used to do in my first job at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ was to answer the email that came in via the "Contact us" link at the bottom of search results pages. I used to get about 100 a day. Every day. All expecting a prompt, polite and correct response back from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ on whatever topic they had emailed about. The variety of enquiries was staggering, from homework essay questions, to asking where the wallpaper in the front room of My Family came from, or trying to obtain a copy of someone's grandmother singing on Songs Of Praise in the 1970s.
By the time I left the ´óÏó´«Ã½ in 2005, we estimated overall the Corporation was receiving something in the order of hundreds of thousands of emails a week from the public - but that was a bit of a finger-in-the-air estimate to be honest. Whatever the figure, it was far, far, far more than could be economically individually answered.
Email isn't the only "new media" route over the last ten years that has given the audience an opportunity to communicate directly with the ´óÏó´«Ã½ - for some time, bbc.co.uk has been hosting message boards.
The early boards used an in-house system called "howerd2". It was named after , as in "A funny thing happened to me on the way to the forum..."
Internal ´óÏó´«Ã½ urban myth has it that the system was built to last for six weeks to provide a message board to accompany one programme. The ´óÏó´«Ã½ ended up using the software for something more like six years.
It was prone to being rather temperamental, and there were frequent problems with keeping the database server in sync with what appeared on the front-end of the web servers. Which is, I believe, the technical way of saying that messages tended to disappear into cyberspace and never be seen again.
This, obviously, infuriated users who had spent time composing their posts. If the message contained a complaint about the ´óÏó´«Ã½, or a political standpoint, and then disappeared due to the bug, it often appeared to them to be the heavy hand of ´óÏó´«Ã½ censorship at work.
The message boards used to be closed overnight, but posts could be made and queued for publication. In the end, moderating the backlog of messages each morning became uneconomical, and the boards were just completely shut at night. Well, sometimes. Sometimes the server would get a little confused, and open up for posting seemingly when it fancied it.
In some cases, the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s message boards proved too popular for their own good. Not only was the technical system stretched to capacity, but moderation was very expensive and communities took on a life of their own in directions the ´óÏó´«Ã½ didn't expect. One of my ex-colleagues, who was a part of the "Community" team, used to say that back in the early 2000s, ´óÏó´«Ã½ producers "didn't always understand why people want to visit the programme x board to talk to each other, rather than to talk about programme x."
The decision to later close some boards in the entertainment and drama areas prompted a furious backlash from what The Times called "":
"They are members of one of the country's most clandestine communities. Predominantly female and in many cases highly educated, they have gathered - unbeknown even to their husbands - under assumed names to meet 'like-minded people' for more than two years. But this morning this mysterious group will wake up to find its cosy world in tatters. Yesterday the ´óÏó´«Ã½ axed the majority of its online message boards."
In the next part of this post, I will look at how the ´óÏó´«Ã½ migrated to a new message board system, and the ever thorny issue of message board moderation.
Martin Belam is a former Senior Development Producer, New Media
Comments
(Vaguely pointless elaboration/correction gubbins...)
Howerd 2 was actually the successor to an earlier system - which was cunningly called... Howerd! Howerd (1) was an evil, cranky piece of software, where almost everything was hardcoded and completely unflexible. It also couldn't handle the sheer weight of users it had on it, so Howerd 2 was built with HUGE amounts of growth potential. In the end, it was actually handling something like 5 times the maximum it was ever designed for - hence the problems. It couldn't cope.
(For those really interested, Howerd 2 was actually based on a usenet server - if you were in the internal network at the ´óÏó´«Ã½, you could actually log on to the servers using a newsreader, if you knew where to look!)
I think there was actually a system prior to Howerd (which was built in the late 1990s) - and I suspect, but don't know, that it was that system (the name of which escapes me now, but I remember it being very dull - something like Message Board Software or Web Board or something) that was built for one programme and was in use for a while. Either way, Howerd itself outlived its welcome.
Okay, I'm biased. I was the bloke who built the (insane) HTML and JavaScript that powered Howerd 2. Many people hated it Howerd 2 and couldn't wait for it to be replaced. I just think it was very mis-understood :)
Thanks Andrew - I felt sure when I wrote this piece that you might be moved to comment. Howerd2 of course implied Howerd1, but I think that was switched off well before my time at the ´óÏó´«Ã½.
Most were gone late 2001 I think - although the C´óÏó´«Ã½ boards might have struggled on into 2002 for reasons I can't recall, but were apparently important at the time.
I really do remember far too much completely useless information...
The first ´óÏó´«Ã½ message board was for the Home Truths Saturday morning radio programme on Radio 4, hosted by John Peel. It launched in 1997. The next board was for EastEnders as we (´óÏó´«Ã½ 'we') fancied a challenge, then Asian Life (now the Asian Network) and then Dr Who. After that producers just wanted message boards and live chats and so on...so the central communities team expanded.
The first boards were run on Webcrossing under a third party agreement. The production side of things was primitive, we had to add things; there was just the capability to moderate, not to host the boards (two different things).
At first it was just me moderating and hosting, but then I got some of the designers and htmlers to help. When the traffic grew too large for the team of 15 to manage, I approached the ´óÏó´«Ã½ librarians to do the moderation as their jobs were under threat; they did a great job as they approached things very sensitively.
The second message board system (Howerd 1, after Frankie Howerd - a good joke I thought at the time) lasted from c. 1998 for a couple of years. Michela Ledwidge coded up Howerd 1 as the message boards became so popular we needed much more capacity. Howerd 1 was supposed to only last six months.
Howerd 2 - which Andrew worked on - came in after that. Traffic kept doubling every six months, so we needed to provide something more robust. Dickon Hood (who did the deep level coding) had the idea to build the system to mimic Usenet, as Andrew says.
There was a whole team of people who got the social media stuff going at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ in the early days, the Central Communities Team, they should be saluted as they really worked hard to get the ball rolling.
The C´óÏó´«Ã½ boards are still going and they are very popular!
Lizzie
I've just tried on three occasions to post on the Editor's Blog without success. Hangs every time.
Hi Clifford,
this blog post from Robin Hamman outlines some of the technical problems with the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s blogs which sometimes makes commenting difficult.
/blogs/bbcinternet/2007/11/robin_post_part_i_1.html