I began my cyber-journey back in mid-80s or thereabout. Internet was not yet a darling of the populace, particularly due to absence of browsing software, in my opinion and observation. There were, of course, in western countries a plethora of bulletin board systems (BBS) and a few commercial services such as Compuserve, GEnie, a few others and AOL (and its precursor QLink). I am fortunate to sample all of these pretty intensively and extensively, GEnie had a serious astrology forum (all varieties of astrology were welcome). Compuserve Information Services (CIS) was the largest and although mostly text-based, had arguably the best interface and library available. So called New Age interests were catered by the religion forum and then Neil Shapiro and Rilla Moulden took upon themselves the then Herculean project of bringing all new-age and mystic disciplines under one roof: The New Age Forum, which within a couple or three years had become so massive that Neil et al thought it is best to start a second parallel forum named simply Newage 2 (there was another screen name of course!).
It lasted for nearly a decade and amassed HUGE amounts of information, knowledge and we also had a library section with cyber-racks dedicated to individual areas such as western astrology, vedic astrology, this that and the other. It was not simply serious stuff or simple naval-gazing exercises and we had the more than occasional intrusion from frustrated members who were simply there to make trouble and pick up fights! The world does not ever change, friends, and so on so forth
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Due to work and family-needs pressure (desirable!) etc (I was on a career path very different from my newage-mysticism interests), I had to focus on my *here and now* reality and so I got distracted.
Then in the 2000s I came upon Mystic Board and WOW, though the body of NewAge forum on CIS was kinda sorta decimated by then, what a wonderful surprise to see that the SOUL lives on in the form of Mystic Board and by then way better browsers had come along and MS-DOS was gone and replaced by Windows!
In my off-line vault, I still have stashed away some important-to-me message threads and beautiful heart warming memories of interactions with sympaticos from Compuserve, although they are either gone or lost to me. Their words do stay with me and also their writings (files downloaded from the New Age Forum Libraries) and I do find much solace in browsing through those, from time to time.
My humble request to Swetha and Brian: Unless there is a cost issue or something tangible like that, such as maintenance of this OUR forum and its contents, please do not abolish any forum or subforum if at all pragmatically and for as long possible. One never knows who might come by either to revisit old haunts, or someone new interested in say, for example Rune Readings and may benefit from what has already gotten shared...?
Compuserve sadly did not or would not or could not do that and I remain aghast and extremely saddned by all the jewels and treasures painstakingly gathered, but ALAS now lost forever...!