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Ever since I first connected to the Internet in 1989, the month after it first became available to the general public, I have been using it as a social medium, in addition to its other manifold uses. Back then the social aspect was limited to a text-based chat client (ytalk), Usenet client (nn), and very basic email client (Elm or Pine) — which included mailing lists and newsletters — and, of course, no spam! If you weren’t online then, think of the anticipation that Google Wave is generating today, how there’s almost nobody using it and how everyone’s uncertain of whether it’s going to explode in popularity or quietly disappear.
Over time came the graphical WWW (via Mosaic in 1993), personal websites, free personal webmail and, while the popularity of email list-servers was enormous and growing, people began creating everything for web browsers. This included converting already existing applications, protocols and concepts to use in a browser — one of these was the re-invention of the mailing list as the WWW forum. Mailing lists are still popular, but seem to be more specialised and limited to more technically-savvy Internet users. Web forums are point-and-click, and they’re everywhere.
Today, just about everyone who uses the Internet is a member of at least one forum, and they have largely taken over mailing lists and the Usenet as places to ask questions, social centres and searchable repositories of information. There is a forum for just about any topic you could possibly imagine and, if you don’t want to go to the expense of hosting your own server or paying for a hosting provider to do it for you, there are advertising-sustained forum providers who will let you create a free forum within minutes.
Regardless of how the technology is implemented, the core idea and result has always been the same: to allow people interested in a certain topic to converse on threaded topics and, with the increasing ubiquity of effective Internet-wide search engines and their software robots, allow searching within fractions of a second. The writing community is no different. While they may vary in their approach, their rules, their levels and type of access, there are writing forums out there that cater for all genres and styles of writing.
I thought I’d write this post to give a brief background of forums and to share a list of some writing forums, though I’ve not necessarily joined them (I am a member of those marked with an asterisk):
- Author Advance*: Social network (with status updates), submission tracking, etc.
- Author’s Den
- BBC Writersroom*: The place to be if you want to write for BBC film, TV or radio.
- Crime Online
- The Dragon’s Inn
- Freelance Writing
- Great Writing*: Was formed from the BBC GetWriting project; releases contributor anthologies.
- Horror Writers UK
- Litopia Writer’s Colony*: Related to the Litopia podcasts.
- UKAuthors
- The Word Cloud
- Writelink
- Writersdock*: Offers community critiquing and writing prompts, among other things.
- Writertopia
- WriteWords
- Writing.com
While I very much hope these are helpful to you, I would appreciate it if you would add your favourite writing forums via the Comments at the bottom of this post. If I get a good response, I’ll look at editing this post to include your recommendations, and that should make this a useful post to new writers or writers who are new to the Internet.
