Foundation of the CBB

[Sequor]

So, me and someone else elsewhere (much younger and new to conlangery) were just curious, does anyone know about how the CBB came into being?

It's funny to me that in the old days the two big forums were called the CBB and the ZBB. The ZBB is very old and was originally a manually updated set of HTML pages called Virtual Verduria, going back to May 2000. The current CBB database seems to go back to 2010, but I'm sure the community is older than that.

Was the CBB originally a group of people from the ZBB who wanted their own separate forum, run differently?

[Arayaz]

Was the CBB originally a group of people from the ZBB who wanted their own separate forum, run differently?

This was what I always heard — the ZBB was too toxic, or something. But folk stories are often distorted, and I am by no means an original CBBer.

[Salmoneus]

So, me and someone else elsewhere (much younger and new to conlangery) were just curious, does anyone know about how the CBB came into being?

It's funny to me that in the old days the two big forums were called the CBB and the ZBB. The ZBB is very old and was originally a manually updated set of HTML pages called Virtual Verduria, going back to May 2000. The current CBB database seems to go back to 2010, but I'm sure the community is older than that.

Was the CBB originally a group of people from the ZBB who wanted their own separate forum, run differently?

Yes, more or less. I'm not sure if Aszev officially was just trying to escape the ZBB, but certainly it was created at a time of some tension on the ZBB, and the CBB quickly attracted people who either didn't like the tone of the ZBB, or just newer people who perhaps felt intimidated by a perceived insideryness of the ZBB.

Just for the record, I came to the ZBB from a forum called conlangia. It wasn't that good, and it disappeared when someone stopped paying for the hosting (or something to that effect), so a bunch of us migrated to the ZBB. 2003, iirc. Although I didn't officially join until sometime later, because originally you didn't have to sign up to post (which is why Jeff (not Geoff, different person) got his special Nguni rank when registration became mandatory).

[elemtilas]

It's funny to me that in the old days the two big forums were called the CBB and the ZBB. The ZBB is very old ...

Very old indeed! And yet ZBB / CBB are newcomers, representing about the 4th generation of online forums for glossopoets.

Third. Before ZBB there were a number of services, such as Yahoo Groups, that supported a wide variety of language invention and also worldbuilding forums. This was an evolution from eGroups, basically an email list management service. This dates back to the mid 1990s.

Second. Before that, there was Conlang-L. It's been at Brown Uni since 1997, and before that was at Copenhagen and before that was a privately managed email list. Back in these days, there were a number of privately managed email lists!

Oo, and before this, there was the toxic waste dump of Auxlang-L --- ZBB at its very worst looks like kindergarten nap time when compared to the flamewars of old. There beed dragons there!

Also around this time there was Tolklang.

First. These private lists and scores of language invention websites rose in prominence upon the supernova death knell of Usenet in the early 1990s. I'm not sure when sci.lang was started, but somewhen between 1980 and the early 1990s. This was where most online language inventors could be found in those wild days.

[Visions1]

It's a pleasure to know this history.
How much of the old websites remains? Or its communities?

[lurker]

I think I've mentioned it before, but I love internet lore like this. I tried joining the ZBB a few weeks ago, but they don't seem to be accepting new signups. Seems like there's a lot of overlap between here and there, anyway, and I was just going to repost my Lonely Galaxy and Commonthroat stuff

[LinguistCat]

I think I've mentioned it before, but I love internet lore like this. I tried joining the ZBB a few weeks ago, but they don't seem to be accepting new signups. Seems like there's a lot of overlap between here and there, anyway, and I was just going to repost my Lonely Galaxy and Commonthroat stuff

Not sure if things have changed, but I know they've had a lot of trouble with bots getting through, so last I heard you had to contact Zomp directly to get something set up. Maybe he decided to put that on pause though. But yeah there is a bit of overlap in both content and membership, so there shouldn't be much you would miss if you can't sign up.

[elemtilas]

It's a pleasure to know this history.
How much of the old websites remains? Or its communities?

Pretty much all gone.

Usenet is still accessible, I believe, but has been rubbish for decades. Obviously, Conlang-L is still going strong. I'm not sure if all the Auxlangers flamed each other into non-existence or not.

All of the other community services like Yahoo Groups are totally gone. I do know that there are archives floating around for old groups like Conculture and its allied groups. I've got an archive of the Yeola-Camay related stuff I'd put on Conculture and Conlang-L, though I'm not sure if anyone else did the same for their own work.

[Aevas]

It seems that there is a pervasive idea that the CBB was founded in some kind of opposition to the ZBB. I can decidedly deny this; there has never been any animosity from my part towards the ZBB or its administration.

There is truth to Salmoneus' observations about perceived tone and insideryness on the ZBB, and we did gain members due to that. However, most early members were active on both forums (as I believe many still are), and the foundation of the CBB certainly predates the "time of some tension on the ZBB" by a few years.

As the forum logo points out, the CBB was founded in 2005 (it turned 19 years old last week ... time flies). The actual board from that time is gone; it was remade from scratch when we changed domains in 2010.

In the end, the actual origin story is almost embarassingly simple. I founded the CBB because it seemed like fun to have my own conlanging forum. This was nothing unique back then; as I recall it, new conlanging forums sprung up fairly often for more or less similar reasons. (We're all coming together due to a shared interest in creating our own versions of things, after all.) But while most such forums died and were forgotten quite quickly, this was not the case for the CBB, which instead took on a life (and culture) of its own.

As for the name, in retrospect I do consider it unfortunate that it ended up being so similar to the ZBB. But hindsight is 20/20.

[Man in Space]

As for establishing links with the SCP Foundation, [DATA EXPUNGED].

[Visions1]

Secure, Conlang, Protect.

[Man in Space]

More like “seCure, Bcontain, Bprotect”.

[Creyeditor]

Or maybe Cecure*, Bontain, Brotect.

Remeber, c before e, except after i. Or something.

[Torco]

back in the day when you found a cool website -and you did, that was the fun of it- it was most likely written by hand in html or something like that, by some dude (not by a megacorpo, i mean). so it was that as soon as I got access to a computer with the internet on it I started googling stuff about tolkien's languages (perhaps it was altavista, or yahoo) and through this I found ardalambion, an excellent and ancient website by a man called helge fauskanger. from there i was introduced to the notion of creating conlangs as a Thing(tm), and from there to the thing that, at least in 2001, was probably the definitive resource on the internet on conlanging: mark rosenfelder's language construction kit. you kids these days learn conlanging from your youtube channels and on your discords and in your amoguses -honestly the youtube conlanging sphere is p cool- but back then forums is where it was at: still, took me a number of years from when I learned the zeeb existed to when I made an account and started posting. somehow I learned there that there also existed the cbb, but yeah it was never a rivalry thing. the cbb has always been noticeably slower, though sometimes not by a lot, but i appreciate the focus on the conworlding. I distinctly remember, when I was young and making my first couple langs I was like "bah, conworld? I'll just make a language without any cultural stuff, just for the aesthetics and the complexity and the interconnectedness of the systems and blablabla" and sure, it was fun, but I quickly came to like the imagining of a world that doesn't exist as the main thing and the language as just exploring one aspect of that, as one would do with history or with technology, religion or politics or whatever.