Longtime ILXors - how has this board changed over time?

the end.

Well, believe it or not, I've been following ILx since 2001 but it is only in the last couple of months that I've felt entirely au fait with ILX. Perhaps it is because of the leaving of some of the old-schoolers giving others a chance to catchup with the in-jokes and terminology.
It is only until very recently that I've stopped feeling like an intruder in some kind of clique. I'm not saying that the original community was a bad thing, far from it, but ILE used to be utterly impenetrable for a long time - every post I wrote, whether I thought it was witty or interesting, was guaranteed to sink like a stone - often dragging the thread down with it. This in turn made me feel rather unworthy.

and I want to second every sentiment in there.

Eh? There have been two huge London-based ones in the past week, with plenty of pictures galore, as well as the (comparatively smaller) LA one! Give us some credit! ;-)

You're right, it's not completely true. I should've said that other traits are harder to convey and pick up on, not impossible.

no its still strong, during the break a few ppl off ilx have started contributing to it, and most of the ppl that post comments also post here.

London ilx has had a shift from FAPs to events in the last six months, threads on these are full of anticipation and talk post-event.

posit: the advent of noize was the single most important event in ilx history

there's thruth in that. for a start the brits had to get more american, or they had to die

image posting used to be somewhat frowned upon in general, iirc. it's strange now to imagine how different and, for some, grating the noize aesthetic was around here in 2004.

there's thruth in that.

I gotta give lols where there are due here

also, not being "nice" xpost

haha did not catch u lj

haha whereas nowadays what killed noize board was the rest of ilx becoming too much like it! or at least, like some sort of amalgamation of its zing-happy brevity with the cosy bro-ness of pre-noize ilx. i can imagine how it came across as highly impolite at first! sometimes it still is. i'd love to see the usual ilx register applied to a british messageboard about, say, cricket. oh wait, i have done. permabanned. XD

btw ilx is MUCH friendlier than it was in 2006 - the snark level, be it thru SB or w/e, has dropped dramatically, and people are far quicker to give each other a break, mostly because if there's a problem it's dealt with rapidly, and the proliferation of poster numbers has made it easier to avoid trouble. maybe also quite a lot of established posters beyond the o.g. canon have become real bros IRL, which wasn't so much the case in days of yore?

I've never known what to make of the noize board, assuming it was just about noize bands. Is that how/why it started? What's the history?

(I guess I'm somewhat longtime... been kicking around since 2002.)

JF, you do realize that hstencil, msp, jack cole, gygax! and dead dead bird were early noize board denizens.

Dangit!

Lol. Funny that 2002 is still not considered old skool. I started posting in 2001 (sept). Fuck. So long.

Hey, so what about now? I joined in late 2005 and feel like, since around the time when the new-new board (stylesheets, radio button polls) debuted, things have had a pretty consistent vibe. Certain posters/interests have come in and out of focus, but generally I feel like the language and rhythm of ILX has not changed much in that time... although I do think it's different than it was even when I joined, when there was still some vestige of an older, longform posting style going, and more nasty-argument venomous barbarism with fewer apologies and retractions. (note, i am drunk, this may not make sense) But I've never kept up with the big names, or the big feuds, or hardly any of the clusterfuck threads, so it could be that for all I know ILX was sundered by some major crisis in mid 2011 and I just totally missed it.

Yes, the intellectual banter seems to have gone down, but that could be due to the fact I don't read as much anymore and thus miss out on it? I get nostalgic about the early days (10 years ago?!?) but time/people move on.

the brits had to get more american, or they had to die

xxxpost
i think dayyyo was right about friendliness (i've been reading ilx for 10 years but most of my posting has been in the last two or three and i remember the queer nervousness i had whenever i said anything before and it was mostly embarrassing stuff that was the product of youthful shite talking and mental illness) and creep of noize board aesthetic which was jarring at first for a mannered starchy ilx.

more americans helps the tone a lot, for me, i find.

ILX just slowly filled up with more and more of the people that many of us went to ILX to avoid. :-/

There are so many people that I used to really treasure, who just stopped posting over the years. I've lost count. That loud voices predominated over quiet voices, but it's the quiet voices that I miss. And then to see an old thread revived, with old names in it, it's a little twinge of regret.

I've been lurking on ILX for, quite literally, millions of years. Here are the changes I've witnessed during key eras.

Hadean: There aren't even any electrons at this stage, but somehow a very early form of ILX exists. It's home to a community of lichens who, in my opinion, are some of the nicest dudes ever to grace the boards. Deep thinkers.

Archean: For a long time nothing happens. There's just this thick grey fog through which the voice of Ned Raggett occasionally booms "Hey!" or "Weeps!"

Proterozoic: The Sinister newsgroup comes into being. Well, when I say "the Sinister newsgroup comes into being", what I really mean is that the continent of Africa, from which man will eventually originate, detaches itself from Gondwana, the great proto-continent. The rest (Belle and Sebastian etc) follows as a matter of course.

Phanerozoic: During this period there's a lot of debate about "rockism" by actual rocks, the self-hating hipsters of the Phanerozoic. Things finally quieten down when one of the rocks points out that stones in glass houses shouldn't throw themselves.

Carboniferous: Flame wars (mostly caused by volcanoes, comets and marsh gas) but still no recognisable human life.

Cambrian: A cockroach is anticipating its wedding 5.5 million years in advance and just will not shut up about it.

Ordovician: Evolution produces something called "D*m Passantin*" and almost terminates itself for shame.

Silurian: There's a distinct possibility of bananas. It's mostly ferns, though, producing their incredibly dull "fern fiction". At least their spelling and punctuation is good.

Jurassic: Dinosaurs? Whine-osaurs, more like. People just will not shut up about their personal problems. So what if you're bored, miserable, depressed, lonely, and it's a Friday night? It's the Jurassic.

Cretaceous: A gigantic war between the morons and the cretins. The cretins win, eat the morons' brains, and instantly became as stupid as them.

Cenozoic: The era of the lazy zing, automatic misanthropy, reflexive cynicism, and conspiracy theories. I actually think the CIA was behind the entire Cenozoic period. If not them, the RIAA.

Holocene: Blighted by Top 10 lists and the Suggest Ban button, this era does at least have my own desperately attention-seeking elaborately-literary troll-posts to recommend it. But basically everything that isn't a ranked list, a work rant, TV-themed water-cooler dribble, or a piss-off kiss-off is tl;dr.

wait, what..

I was here from the (almost) very beginning. A month or two after it was erected, I guess. It was just very vibrant. But I can understand how it was so intimidating. Thing is, you just had to throw yourself in the pit. The nastiness was all in good fun. But now it is much more cosy, I guess.

Is Ned still around? I don't see his posts anymore.

Ned will be posting until they turn off the internet.

I was a random Googler in the early days. I'd say there were about four periods:

1. 2000-2002 Tiny group of people, few posts but longform and in depth. Very much linked to Freaky Trigger, Usenet etc...

2. 2002-2004 Quite a few more join - probably from Sinister. Plenty of FAPs. Tweeness is accepted, encouraged in places even. Generally a very nice accepting place to be (especially if you're an indiekid), but maybe a bit TOO nice for some people's tastes.

3. 2005-2007 Noize Board/Zing era. Huge influx of posters, many from the US. Much faster and snarkier posting style. Image bombing. Multiple boards. Multiple usernames, sockpuppets etc. Hugely meta. Took me a while to adjust and I remember getting upset and leaving on more than one occasion.

4. 2008-2012 Plateau era. A slight mellowing off. Not as volatile as before, but not exactly a return to the second era either. Posters are more comfortable with each other's steez and so it's more apparent when somebody's trolling or whether it's just a bit of banter. Not as many new posters joining and generally a little easier to keep up with.

heh im not sure about indiekid acceptance in 2002. Mostly because former indiekids were here and had lots of guilt. If you were a former indiekid but hated indie by then you were accepted.
Though in 2001 it was worse!

imagebombing was the worst thing to happen to ilx.

dog latin for ilx board historian

The early days of ILX - especially ILM - were very much "reformed indie kids discovering that there was life beyond indie" in a refreshing and polymorphous way - and it wasn't nearly as polarised and tribal as it is today, with Metal vs Goon Crew or whatever. I wouldn't dare post on a "rolling Genre X thread" these days - in a way that I did feel much more comfortable posting on an individual artist thread 10 years ago, saying "hey, what's all this, then" and someone very clever would explain.

i wonder if mark s misses categorising threads?

I miss categorising threads. That was one of my favourite pastimes, and a great way to reacquaint oneself with the history of the board.