It started with a big bulky computer we bought at Sears. It didn’t have a hard drive, but a it had a modem and a floppy disc (two of them actually) that allowed us to connect to the Prodigy service.

Once we got online, we didn’t do what the majority of people in the mid-90s did. We didn’t look for recipes or jokes. We typed “Don Henley” into the search bar and found a message board. We found Mike and LindaT. We found Vicky and Cheryl. We found Community.

That community has changed a lot over the years. It’s taken on lot of forms. It’s been a scrapbook on AOL before we learned how to code a website. It’s been IRC chat (Hello Debbie!). For the longest time, it was a message board. A great hulking thing full of spirited debates and photo threads and riddles and games. People from around the world joind us (Hello Eaglelanders!) and we formed friendships. We had meetups at concerts and just for the heck of it. We thrived in our Community.

Maybe it got too big. Maybe we didn’t know what we were doing. Soon it was full of spam and petty bickering over things that weren’t even related to the Eagles. We hadn’t signed up to moderate a game message board and by that time Facebook was an entity we could compete with and dealing with the Spam was nightmarish. So we shut it down and we moved everything to Facebook.

And it’s been great. We’ve got the page and we’ve got the groups. And the groups have multiplied and there’s just so much content. Things are really great, but there’s something we miss about the “good old days”. We miss checking the boards and seeing our friends and what they posted. We miss sparring in a friendly and civilized way with people with different ideas.

Some of that is possible on Facebook, but at times, that just seems impossible. The other day in a Facebook group that will remain nameless, someone posted the ENTIRE video from the Forum DVD. Lisa pointed out that it was a big copyright violation. Instead of having a polite discussion about it, people just went off, yelling and screaming that it was their right and they could do what they wanted and then they kicked Lisa out of their group for “ruining their fun”. Seriously? They went from zero to scary in 3 seconds. Facebook also seems to be a place where people will just dump a photo or a video clip without discussing it. This weekend CNN is going to have a television special about Glenn that I still can’t wrap my head around. I want to talk about it with other fans. I’ve seen the trailer about a 100 times on facebook, but nobody wants to talk about it. Is this show ethically right? Should we feel okay watching it? What do I do with the feelings that it brings up?

That got us thinking. What if we could bring back the discussion board. We tried about a year ago with the old board, but it was old-fashioned and still was rife with SPAM and errors. We researched new boards and found one. We think it’s pretty slick. It lets you log in with Facebook. It’s pretty. We hope it doesn’t get Spam. We hope you’ll join us there.

We hope you’ll be part of the community.

Information about this new discussion group will be coming in the next post.