Radiohead Message Board (Sept. 9, 1999 – Feb. 24, 2016)

When I first signed up for a Radiohead message board, I didn’t actually own any of the band’s albums yet. I just knew that these were my people, and message boards were how to find them while I was living in small-town Ohio, feeling like the titular character of Radiohead’s most popular song (which any real fan disavows). Boardies talked more about each other than about the music, though Radiohead themselves would show up from time to time, their names highlighted in blue. (Jonny Greenwood coined an acronym we used liberally: VLTF, vomit leaking through fingers.) Dozens of real-life relationships formed from the board; a few children can thank it for their existence. The beautiful thing about the board was the sharp precipice after the 15th page of posts — no cache, no archive. In its heyday (2000 to 2004), the 15 pages, each with 30 threads, would account for mere hours or activity; more recently it would be days. On Wednesday, the board shut down for good after more than 16 years of existing in essentially the same form. When word spread of the board ending, dozens of us flooded it one last time with inside jokes, polls and love letters, and our names were finally blue.