The IGS Guitar Forum

The seminars ran for a week a year. The forum ran continuously, and in the end it outlived them. This page describes what it was and why it mattered; the board itself is not reproduced here.

What it was

The Guitar Forum began as a small message board attached to the seminar site and grew into the largest thing on the domain by a very wide margin — thousands of threads across two main sections, one on guitar and one for everything else the community wanted to talk about. It ran first on UBB software, later on a phpBB installation, and finally as a link on a rebuilt site that had little else left on it.

Its purpose was straightforward and the organisers said so in their own brochure copy: "Student jam sessions are popping up more and more often at our Guitar Forum and reports of both staff and student reunions are coming in from all corners of the world." A residential week produces a community with no natural way to keep talking. The board was that way.

What was on it

Broadly: tunings and technique questions; arguments about recordings and transcriptions; people arranging to meet at the next session; instrument talk; the perennial gear questions about slides, action height and string gauges; and a large volume of ordinary conversation between people who had spent a week together and wanted to keep in touch. Faculty posted. Alumni organised regional meet-ups. Newcomers asked the questions the FAQ had already answered, and were answered again patiently.

Why the threads are not reproduced

Three reasons, and all three are deliberate.

First, the posts were written by private individuals for a small community, not for publication in an archive years later. Reproducing thousands of personal messages in a permanent public record is not a restoration; it is a repurposing, and none of the people who wrote them agreed to it.

Second, message boards left unattended after a site lapses attract abuse. Old thread URLs on defunct forums are a standard target for link manipulation, and a number of this board's addresses were used exactly that way after the site went quiet. Those addresses are not served here and never will be — they return a 404 and that is the correct answer to them.

Third, the board's value was never in any individual thread. It was in the fact that the conversation continued between sessions. That is a fact about the community, and it is recorded here in a sentence, which is all it needs.

Where that conversation went

Communities of this kind did not disappear when individual boards did; they consolidated. The long-running Mudcat Café still hosts the same sort of discussion — source arguments, tune provenance, transcription disputes and regional meet-ups — for the folk and blues world generally. Anyone who used the IGS board will recognise the format immediately.

The rest of the archive

For what the board was talking about, see the repertoire and tunings pages. For the week that produced the community in the first place, see the programme and the letters alumni sent afterwards. The organisers' own account of the community's growth is in the history page.