The Nines

__*Unless you have to moderate them.__

Over at Look For The Nines, the official-for-now site for The Nines, I set up a forum to handle discussion about the movie. I had deep ambivalence about doing this.

Forums pre-date blogs, instant messaging, and even email as we understand it. Stretching back to their BBS roots, forums allow truly user-generated conversations. On a blog like this one, the comments sections are limited to the topic of the post, and have a very short shelf-life (except for the endless and pointless [Prince of Persia](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2004/prince-of-persia-announced) thread I had to finally shut down.) Forum topics, on the other hand, can cover anything, and can run as long as there are still people interested in the conversation.

That said, I think message boards bring out the worst in people. Given the opportunity to say anything, an annoying percentage of people will say anything, which is to say, nothing of merit. While there are various systems of karma and tagging to help punish true miscreants, there’s no magic plug-in to detect illiterate, off-topic rambling.But here’s a suggestion for coding wizards: How about a service like Google’s image labeler “game” in which real people would look at a forum post and vote on whether it’s sensible? The best one can do, it seems, is offer avatars — those little pictures beside users’ names. I subconsciously discount anything said by a person with a stupid avatar.

I knew I couldn’t ponder my forum misgivings for very long: As of 11:20 p.m. Sunday night, 1,300 people will have seen The Nines. I wanted to offer a virtual meeting place where viewers could dissect and discuss what is honestly a pretty complicated movie. And that meant a forum.

So I bit the bullet and installed one. The technical stuff wasn’t that rough at all. After considering various forum structures I liked and despised, I decided to limit it to just two boards, Before and After. The former would be for all general discussion about the movie and its release (no spoilers), while the latter would be specifically about story points and things in the movie (that is, spoilers-a-go-go). Why just two boards? In my experience, sites with extensive folder structures become unworkable. It ends up being so many clicks to check on an old thread that one quickly gives up. In the end, one or two boards (often labeled “General Discussion”) carry 95% of the active threads.

Unlike blogging software, the tricky part with a forum isn’t getting it set up, but getting it rolling. Since you’re relying on random strangers to post entries, you need a certain critical mass to get it running. It’s a lot like throwing a party: no one wants to be the first to arrive, standing awkwardly near the keg, wondering if there’s a better party elsewhere. So we needed people, stat. For this, I relied on the power of celebrity.

Ryan Reynolds posted a link to the site on his MySpace page, which got the ball rolling. (It’s worth noting that of the 12 or so forum participants so far, three of them run Ryan Reynolds fansites.) With 16 topics and 43 posts, it’s not exactly Digg. But I’m hoping that it will get some post-Sundance traction. And if not, it’s only cost about two hours of time.

For a change, I’ve actually delegated something: I’m not the moderator on the site. But I will be stopping by to answer questions from time to time, assuming there are questions to answer.

(Update March 2011: The forums section for Look For The Nines is no longer running. Also, Ryan Reynolds nixed his MySpace page years ago.)