Talk:Strange World

I don't know why people say it feels like a web chat. If you have to refresh to see new posts, it won't feel like a web chat. It doesn't feel that way any more than /b/ did that day when a bunch of Shana fans were posting at the same time. G1ade (talk) 08:03, 14 May 2022 (EDT)

There are chat programs where you need to refresh to see new posts.. Or imageboard softwares where you don't need to. If you had auto update thing enabled on /b/, you wouldn't need to refresh to see new posts for example. I personally think creation of the word "chat" was a mistake, as what we call "forum" and "chat" are fundamentally the same thing with different looks --Kaguya (talk) 08:16, 14 May 2022 (EDT)

What Kaguya said, but also: Compared with the likes of Usenet/Netnews and WWWBoard, web-based Japanese bulletin boards were extremely chat-like (especially the single-line ones like what Ayashii World started out on) - in fact, they are basically just WWWBoard with a WebChat layout at their core! And when I say WebChat, I mean like WBS (WebChat Broadcasting System) and similar, which were hugely popular in the mid-90s:

• http://www.agocg.ac.uk/reports/mmedia/handbook/fg13_5.gif
• https://www.rigacci.org/docs/biblio/online/cgi/gifs/16fig07.gif
• https://www.rigacci.org/docs/biblio/online/cgi/gifs/16fig06.gif

--Anonwaha (talk) 09:45, 14 May 2022 (EDT)

Nope, still not feeling it. G1ade (talk) 18:04, 14 May 2022 (EDT)

IRC is my reference point for chat program, maybe that's why. Even when auto-update is enabled on an imageboard it still doesn't feel properly 'chat-like'. G1ade (talk) 18:08, 14 May 2022 (EDT)

but what about this very talk page, is it technically a "chat"? a "forum"? Neither? What are we using? Are we using something to begin with O_o? Ayashii... --Kaguya (talk) 19:19, 14 May 2022 (EDT)

It's its own category of thing. It's a wiki. G1ade (talk) 20:49, 14 May 2022 (EDT)

By the way, check out Ward Cunningham's C2 wiki. It was the first wiki on the internet. It's mostly about programming languages/practices and hacker culture. The wiki's dormant now, but it makes an interesting study of how a wiki culture developed under constraints different to modern wikis. E.g. pages on that wiki are like if the main article pages and the talk pages on modern wikis were combined into one, so you are reading peoples' commentary and interjections with the articles themselves. Article names have to be at least two words long partly because of reasoning that a topic that can be summarized in one word was too general to have an article about, or something like that. Much of the time text and conversations were shuffled around and trimmed and split into new pages and people had to repair the flow of text to keep it coherent. One or two hardheaded shitters shat up a large portion of the wiki over time with argumentative verbal diarrhoea and people tried to quarantine it because few people were willing to just delete paragraphs outright. G1ade (talk) 21:08, 14 May 2022 (EDT)

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IRC is my reference point for chat program [...] G1ade (talk) 18:08, 14 May 2022 (EDT)

I'm not talking about IRC (which predates the web and wasn't as popular as web chat was in its prime) nor "chat programs" (i.e. IM, skype, etc. - which came after web chat) - I'm talking about web chat! It's on the web! Of course, web chat has been almost completely irrelevant since forums and IM took off in the latter half of the 90s... but prior to those, web chat was very prominent. Now bear with me as I take you on a journey...

On the Japanese side, there were countless web chat instances using things like the popular Yui Chat script, which was based on Rescue's WebCHAT script. In the mid 90s, there were many popular sites that allowed people to create their own web chat "rooms", and it was on one of these sites (Digital Eden to be precise) where Ayashii World's presence on the web began. Here's what a random Digital Eden room looked like - even though the Ayashii World room was unfortunately not archived (it is listed however), all the rooms that are archived look identical to each other, so I'm 99% certain this is what it would have looked like. For the first year of its existence (1996/08/21–1997/09/08), Ayashii World was hopping between sites just like this (as opposed to using server hosts that allowed custom CGI scripts)

Rescue also made the incredibly popular MiniBBS (here's a random example of what the popular 7.5 version looked like), first released on 1996/05/02. It married the WWWBoard concept (which during 1995-1996 was the definitive web-based bulletin board script around the globe - it was when MiniBBS took off in Japan and Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB) took off in the West that we went our seperate ways... until 4chan came along!) with a web chat-like interface. Instead of displaying post titles in a threaded manner (as was typical with Usenet/Netnews newreaders and WWWBoard), it displayed all posts in full, and in chronological order - just like a web chat!

Shiba adopted MiniBBS on 1997/09/08 when he moved to Free X-Tel, a Korean server host that allowed the use of CGI scripts - he and others would make some modifications to it, but at its core it was still MiniBBS. Now with the context of "bulletin boards" typically being the WWWBoard style sites with university-educated people making lengthy and well-written posts, and web chats typically being for casual/rapid discussion amongst "ordinary folk" with significantly less importance placed on formality, correct formatting, spelling, etc., this is why Ayashii World was considered to be "chat like" (along with the fact it just plain looked like a slightly more elaborate web chat!)

There's a whole other discussion you could get into with how both the imageboard format and the Amezou/2ch formats grew out of MiniBBS (and therefore are also "chat like" at their core), but I'll leave that for another talk page! --Anonwaha (talk) 22:51, 14 May 2022 (EDT)

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Do you have a copy or archive of that script? --Kuz (talk) 23:16, 14 May 2022 (EDT)