Goodbye to the old, hello to the new: Developments in the Peoples Temple Discussion Forum

The Jonestown Discussion Forum, which was launched several years ago, took a few hard knocks in its life until it finally broke down earlier this year. Fortunately, a new incarnation of the forum – with a new address of www.jonestownforum.dk and benefiting from the lessons we have learned – will be up and running by the end of October 2010.

The discussion forum had endured a self-imposed hiatus for a few months in early 2009 while we discussed how to avoid some of the uglier discussions we had witnessed in the winter of 2008. Things were slow for a while after the relaunch, but even with a lower number of new posts in the forum, we still had a steady intake of new members who apparently wanted to check things out for a while before joining the discussion.

In May 2010, though the forum took a fatal hit: The server with its free hosting service that held the forum had crashed beyond repair. Gone were the forum and its entire content. The only survivor was our popular “Ask a former member a question” thread, which I happily backed up recently, however crudely, into a word document. After having absorbed the blow that the original forum was lost, we determined that we were not going to be stopped by a petty glitch.

Instead we decided to start anew, and the forum will return to life at its own domain address which I have registered specifically for this purpose. The .dk suffix in www.jonestownforum.dk stands for Denmark, which is where I am based. I have chosen this suffix entirely for practical reasons; the language of the forum will still be English (albeit it will be my personal variety of it, which can at times be amusing to native English speakers).

I am currently educating myself in the use of forum software – an entirely new world to me – and plan to have the forum up and running again by the end of October. I hope that our loyal members from the old forum will join us at our new address, and that many new members will join to our discussions and share their knowledge. In the meantime, if you wish to be notified when the forum is ready, just send me an e-mail at rikke@wettendorff.net, and I will let you know when the debate begins!

(An article introducing Rikke Wettendorff as the new co-editor of the jonestown report appears here. Her complete collection of articles for this site appears here.)