Celebrating 10 Years Of The Chronicle's Bulletin Board

The year was 1999. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had just closed above 10,000 for the first time. President Bill Clinton had recently been acquitted in his impeachment trial. The movie The Matrix had just opened in theaters, and pop singer Britney Spears’ debut single “… Baby One More Time” was atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Google was not yet a verb—merely a newly launched search engine prototype. And the Chronicle opened the virtual doors on its online discussion forum.

Originally called “Between Rounds,” the site was organized around the magazine’s discipline-specific columns of the same name. There were only four discussion areas, where readers were invited to share their thoughts on dressage, hunters and jumpers, eventing, and letters to the editor and Commentaries from the magazine.
   
A few months after the forum launched, a fifth section was added for sport horse breeding, and the letters and Commentaries section was replaced with a discussion area for horse care.
   
The initial intent of the forum was to encourage reader discussion of Chronicle articles, but members of the “bulletin board” (as it is commonly known, or the “COTH BB” in Internet shorthand) had other ideas. They wanted to discuss what color show shirts complemented a particular color hunt coat and how to prevent unsightly panty lines under breeches.
   
They also tackled more serious issues that had little (or nothing) to do with horses, such as eating disorders, national politics and homosexuality. They displayed outrageously clever senses of humor, as well as enormous generosity, compassion, and interest in making the sport horse world a better place.
   
A decade later, the BB has almost 43,000 registered members and more than 1.2 million stored posts. It generates 1.5 million page views per week. It now contains 11 different discussion areas, as well as sections for classified advertising and archived favorite discussions.

Words And Actions

The forum has indeed proved to be a virtual gathering place to discuss equestrian issues of the day. From the National Governing Body disputes to the approved helmet rule, from safety in eventing to the National Animal Identification System, whatever issues were the talk around in-gates and tack rooms were also being dissected online.
   
But it hasn’t been just about talk—it’s also been about action.
   
The BB has provided a springboard for grassroots efforts on a myriad of fronts. One of the first was a series of rule-change proposals, written by BB members and submitted to the then-American Horse Shows Association at the annual meeting.