Of Some Possible Interest To Wagnerians — Present And Future

Having purchased one of the very first IBM PCs produced (c. 1981), and equipping it with a modem as soon as that device and the software necessary to run it became available for home-user use, we've had a long experience of online discussion groups (called in those pre-Internet, pre-Web days, a Bulletin Board System, or, more familiarly, a BBS), and, generally speaking, found participation in such groups to be enormously satisfying as long as we were careful in our selection of which BBSes to join.

Well, BBSes have long gone the way of the dodo, and so-called eMail "lists" and Usenet — a kind of internationally organized and distributed BBS which actually predates the BBS format and was the first of its kind — are fast going the same way as they're relatively clumsy to use, and limited to posts employing text only, and plaintext at that. The online forum is today the de facto standard online discussion group, and there are gazillions of them out there, most of them cluttered intolerably with whiz-bang "features" and a plethora of sub-forums, and therefore the haunts of kiddies of all ages, and so to be scrupulously avoided (unless you're a kiddie, that is).

Given their in-gazillions presence, one would expect that one could find a worthwhile, non-cluttered, non-kiddie-populated online forum devoted solely to discussions centering on one's special interests whatever those special interests might be. Turns out, that's sometimes a lot harder to do than it might appear. We've, for instance, searched for years for such an online forum devoted solely to discussion of the works of Richard Wagner, and found none. The best we could find was, ironically enough, not an online forum, but a Usenet newsgroup (newsgroup is the Usenet term for forum of which Usenet has thousands). But as we above noted, Usenet is relatively clumsy to use and limited in expression. We wanted something better, but it didn't seem to be out there.

Until now, that is.

All the above has been merely a long-winded way of introducing a spanking new online forum (it went online just yesterday) called, The Wagner Group. It has no user posts as of this writing, and but a single member: our good self. TWG is an online forum that's absent every kiddie magnet the software permitted us to remove, has an absolute minimum of online-forum clutter, is powerful but simple and intuitive to use, and is devoted solely to discussion of the works of Richard Wagner.

So, if the works of Richard Wagner are your thing, or you think they might have the potential to be, stop by TWG, register (it's absolutely free, and "guests" — i.e., the non-registered — have only read-only access on TWG), and contribute a post or four to start the discussion going.