Small Night In – a replacement for the Big Day Out forum
In brief: Much of the Big Day Out forum community has relocated to Small Night In after the BDO forum shutdown.
The popular Big Day Out forum was shut down early last week after the death from ecstacy overdose of Gemma Thoms at the Perth Big Day Out.
I’ve got several friends on the BDO forum and they lost a part of their community. Since I’ve got some 50GB of bandwidth, which my other sites barely use a fraction of, I set up a replacement forum called Small Night In. The site has been received enthusiastically and will remain online for as long as people find it useful.
Whether or not the BDO forum ever comes back is unknown, with complete silence on the matter issuing forth from the organisers. I’m enjoying the technical challenges of running a busy forum (and they are many) and learning a bit about community management at the same time.
The forum is an out-of-the-box installation of PHPBB3 with a couple of modifications installed. I prefer to keep things fairly simple and rely on free, community-supported software, so PHPBB is a perfect solution (as well as being the same system used on the BDO forum, giving users some continuity of experience).