I dug out a lot from our past and seeing how Chat Quotes thread in Random board existed in the first place, I feel that its safe to conclude that BBS was supposed to go hand-in-hand with the Chatrooms, so that we could foster a proper sense of community solidarity for our members. And if we want to get our site back into proper shape, we need a proper real-time communication platform.

When our community used to be bigger, our members plagued drrr.com alongside the drrr.com-only scrubs. So not a single members would be left behind unless they wanted to, drrr.com in the first place only allowed 20 people at max to be in the same chatroom at a time so there were always plenty of rooms that any members could get into and just started talking with its inhabitants.

Nowadays, people flocked to one of the 5 listed groups in the Chatrooms page linked above the site. But get this sherlock, 5 giant chatroom with limitless member slot is not a proper replacement to drrr.com's short-lived, small chatrooms that can be duplicated endlessly by anyone.

With our dwindling number today, it didn't matter anymore whether we could take back some exclusive part of drrr.com for our member base alone. But instead, I found that the IRC chatroom has been dead for a while, and it was there that I managed to rebuild some semblance of a proper community.

Ayanavi spoke of the time when BBS was in its early days, the community was very small and they ended up forming a really tight knit group. When a new name came in, everyone knew who the new guy was & since there wasn't a lot of names to memorize either, they tried to make sure the new guy knew all the regulars as well.

Misuto followed that passage with the fact that he joined the site a bit later than her, but there wasn't any chatrooms at the time until a month after the site was up. And so, none of the members from that tight-knit group really knew each other personally until they got that opportunity to converse in real time.

"After a while, so many people were joining that it became kind of impossible to keep kind of thing up, so we started dividing out into 'cells'." it was just a metaphor for who knew who, Ayanavi says.

But its likely that we'll never reach that point where so many people were joining, so I believe just having this IRC channel would suffice. If not then well, we gotta figure out a way to make our own chatroom site, or just plague the chatroom like old times. Only time will tell.

Yeah, and it makes sense. BBS is the day-to-day stuff you don't want anyone to miss while IRC is the real-time chit-chat (or the personal stuff you want to keep in a more closed circle). Why they were paired off and used back then is easy to suss out, though why people use IRC and BBS nowadays may be a more complex issue.