The Forum Years

Leaving the first group

By the later 1990s the online discussion group where the therian community began had grown crowded and argumentative. It had been made for talk about werewolf stories, and it now held several different conversations at once, not all of them friendly. Between 1997 and 1999, after a quarrelsome period, many of its members left for places of their own.

They did not go to one place. They scattered across independent sites, small mailing lists and the first purpose-built forums. That scattering set the pattern for the next fifteen years: not one community but many, overlapping, sharing members and words, and frequently disagreeing. It was in these years, too, that the word contherian was coined, one of the first of many terms made by people who read the early writing and did not quite see themselves in it.

Personal pages and rings

Before the large forums, and alongside them, there were personal pages. A typical one was built by hand by its owner and had a few plain sections: a page about the author and their theriotype or kintype, a shift log, an essay or two, a page of links to friends, and perhaps a guestbook where visitors could leave a line. Many were decorated with small animal pictures and dark backgrounds that are now hard to read.

These pages were linked together in rings. A ring was a chain of sites on one theme, each carrying a small panel with buttons for the next site, the previous one, and a random member. A reader could walk around the whole ring in an evening, from one stranger's account of being a wolf to another's account of being a raven, and come away knowing that they were not alone. For many people in isolated places, that walk was how they first found the community.

The great forums

Through the 2000s the center of community life was the large forum. Several rose to prominence over the decade, some for therians, some for otherkin, some for both, and the busiest of them were alive with conversation at every hour of the day.

They were organized into boards. There would be a board for introductions, one for questions about shifting, boards for particular kinds of animal or being, a board for spiritual matters, one for gatherings in different regions, and an off-topic board where most of the friendships were really made. Long threads ran for years. Members wore signatures beneath their posts with their theriotypes listed, a quotation, and later the theta-delta, which was designed in 2003 by members of one of these forums.

Each forum was kept in order by volunteer moderators. They wrote the rules, moved posts to the right boards, warned members who broke them and, when necessary, banned them. It was unpaid, often thankless work, and the character of a forum depended heavily on the people who did it.

Read the FAQ first

Every forum had its newcomers, and every newcomer seemed to ask the same few questions. Am I a therian? How do I shift? What is my theriotype? How can I be sure? The answers had already been written many times, in the long FAQ of the mid-1990s and in its many successors, and the standard reply became a single line: read the FAQ first.

At its best this was good advice. It asked newcomers to slow down, read what others had worked out, and think before claiming anything. It protected the community's hard-won consensus that physical shifting is not possible, and posts claiming otherwise were challenged quickly. At its worst it became a way of brushing people off, and some newcomers who were frightened or lonely left and did not come back. Many forums tried to steer between the two, with gentle introductions boards and members who made a point of welcoming people. The advice on the awakening page is in that gentler tradition.

Essays, libraries and indexes

The forum years were above all years of writing. The characteristic form was the long personal essay: a careful account of one person's experience, reasoned through and offered for others to test against their own. Hundreds were written. A large part of the vocabulary in the glossary was coined or refined in them, and the first books written from inside the community appeared in the same decade.

Because forum threads scrolled away and were hard to search, volunteers began collecting the best essays into libraries and indexes, with short summaries, categories and reading lists for newcomers. These collections were among the most valued sites of the era. Werelibrary.com is kept in the same spirit, as the about page explains, and the essay shelves carry on the form.

The great debates

Three arguments ran through the whole period, often all at once.

• Spirit or mind. Was therianthropy a matter of the soul, or of the mind? The debate was fierce early on and ended in a truce: both understandings are accepted, and nobody is required to choose. The page on spiritual and psychological understandings sets out the positions.
• Physical shifting. The consensus that bodily transformation is impossible was already firm by the later 1990s, but it had to be defended again with every new wave of arrivals.
• Who belongs. Did otherkin belong on therian forums? Did people whose theriotypes were mythic, the theriomythic, count as therians? What about people who did not shift, or who felt kinship but not identity, or who identified with beings from stories? Each question was argued at length, and each usually ended with a new word and a slightly larger tent.

The page on how the words changed follows the vocabulary that came out of these arguments.

Quarrels and splits

Small communities magnify their quarrels, and the forums had many. Members fell out with moderators over a ban or a rule. Moderators fell out with owners. A disagreement over spirituality, or over who belonged, could split a forum in two, and the people who left would often found a rival forum within weeks, sometimes taking whole boards of members with them. A few of these splits were bitter and remembered for years.

Looking back, the pattern is easier to see than it was at the time. Many quarrels were not really about the stated issue but about trust, tone and the strain of running a community for free. More gentleness on all sides would have saved a great deal, and that lesson is part of the inheritance too.

What was lost

In the 2010s community life moved again, this time to blogs and social platforms. The forums thinned out, and one by one many of them closed. Some were shut deliberately by owners who had moved on. Some vanished when a bill went unpaid or a database failed. Free hosting services that had held thousands of personal pages closed down, and the rings broke apart link by link.

With them went a great deal of writing: essays, long threads in which ideas were first worked out, shift logs kept for years, the records of gatherings, and the ordinary daily talk of a generation. Some was saved by individuals and by archives of the old web, often only in part. Much was simply lost. Newer members sometimes rediscover, with great excitement, ideas that were thoroughly discussed twenty years earlier, without knowing that the discussion ever happened.

Why keeping archives matters

A community that cannot remember its own arguments has to have them again. Archives let newcomers see that their questions have been asked before, and asked well. They give credit to the people who did the hard work of finding words. And they show how much the community changed its mind, which is a useful reminder that it may need to do so again.

Keeping them carries duties too. Many of those who wrote in the forum years used pen names and were very young, and some would not want their old posts passed around today. Good archiving respects that, and tells the shape of the story without exposing the people in it. This library tries to follow that rule, as its editorial principles describe.