We're closing the 5 live messageboards

"So we're closing the existing 5 live messageboards when 5 live Now goes live."



That is a shame as they seem to be the last place on the BBC website where current affairs can be openly discussed, without the straightjackets associated with blogging.



And wouldn't have been better to have announced this on the boards themeselves first?

Apologies, I was a bit quickoff the mark.



It is a sore subject after the Reynolds debacle on POV.



Aleast this time there is no sham consultation or pretence that the boards are being improved. Just the axe.



A pity, but I suppose the BBC can't do everything.



"We've already closed our Station messageboard: users who want to offer feedback about the station in a public forum can still do so - via the 5 live blog which provides an opportunity to engage with senior figures from the radio station."



It has the huge disadvantage that feedback can only be given on the subjects defined by the blogger. That earlier decision was probably more dubious than the decision to get rid of the nwes boards, which are tangental to the stations work.

It's a very healthy discussion and suggests that there is strong support from the users (you know people who pay the licence fee) to keep the old message board open as it was the only open discussion forum specifically about current news stories.

Typical of the standard BBC arrogance. Still your vast salaries are all that matter I guess. Never, ever, ever, give the customers what they want, news and current affairs messageboards. Serially close the lot (The Debate R4, The Great Debate, Today and finally, R5) with ever inventive lies as to the motivation, can't have us peasants failing to follow the BBC in house political agenda can we, close it all down before the election gets under way. Pretend this garbage new idea is of any relevance.

It is utterly shameful the publicly owned and forced tax paid national news institution deliberately refuses to provide a news and current affairs messageboard system. Because of its own in house ends.

Nation will speak unto Nation, well they mean select few self important media organisations only. Clearly discovered your mistake in being open to the people and you are slamming the door shut as fast as you feel you can get away with, keep the great unwashed public out of the thing.

//His post on the UK News board already has a pretty healthy discussion going.



Steve Bowbrick, editor, 5 live blog//



It certainly does Steve - and I'd characterize it as about 95% against closure of a message board with a dedicated following. Why are the views of the actual users being deliberately ignored? Why is nobody from the BBC responding to the hundreds (about to breach the 1000 mark) of comments? Can you get someone to face the users Steve? Thanks.

hello

The closure was not unexpected, the BBC has form. Too many views expressed with which the BBC does not agree. Can't have that can we?

Yes well, what I have seen on the five live message boards Is that many of the posters are answering their own posts....maybe the blog will get rid of these schizofrenic posters. Perhaps they'll move into Gavins on a permanent basis. I hope so!

Jem:



When I am reading the information; Next week...Is there been a specified date e.g. Monday...???



=Dennis Junior=

The closure of the news boards was inevitable as the people who actually used them probably numbered less than thirty .

What some posters failed to realise is that posting with several accounts fooled very few people.

Another problem was people who could not tell the difference between a message board and a chat room .

With the new set up people with something to say will have the potential to reach a wider audience.

12



"...Another problem was people who could not tell the difference between a message board and a chat room..."



I think this was the principle problem, easily fixed though.



Blogs are a controlled space in comparison with the freedom offered by the Five Live Message Board where users even had the luxury of being able to start their own threads.



The Five Live Message Board should have been seen as a service to licence payers not as something to be cast aside.

Hi guys



GL with the roll-out Jem

A wider audience?



Will the blogs be actively promoted on Radio 5 programmes?



The messageboard was totally ignored by programmes.

The messageboard was totally ignored by programmes.



That's why they were ignored, the posts on 5 live were not up for debate....they were more a debacle. Posters with "several accounts" answering their own posts made the boards a mockery!

Another Jem "triumph".



She's wrecked the TV message board together with her side kick Nasty Nick Reynolds and moves on with the bull dozer to the next site.



Its not a question of living in the 90's - its a question of improving services



Blogs do NOT improve services.

Yeah - pre mod - excellent - Not

Hi all.

Very user-unfriendly IMO. Not a patch on the Message Board format.



Does the Beeb actively wish to stifle debate between license-fee payers or do you simply not care so long as your inflated salaries continue to be paid?



I for one will not be contributing once the true Message Boards are closed, but then I suspect that was the idea all along.

The Asian Network news board is still going, presumably anyone can post there?

My initial opinion of the new system is it's a load of carp. This woulkd have been posted 48hrs ago but the whole thing wasn't working. Not surprising the login page says it's a beta system. Perhaps you should have got it to work properly first before rolling it out. Microsoft learned with Windows 98 just how silly it is to roll out beta software as if it were a fully-tested, fully-working version.



Ever heard of the saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it....?"

"Typical of the standard BBC arrogance. "



Yes - very much a case of, "If I want your opinion I'll give it to you...!"



Mefinks GaruptaSinghs pot may be calling his kettle back - his tone and style seem awfully like a certain other poster.



However, I stand corrected if necessary.



Another thing; seemingly no smilies.

Another thing; seemingly no smilies.





Quote tags?

The blog, redolent to say the least....well done the BBC! a blog for intellectuals. That said, hopefully this blog will not be plagued with adolescent chit chat like the 5 live boards!

Belchard



There doesn't appear to be any danger of chit chat at the moment, idol or otherwise!

The decision to close the fivelive messageboards was the right one. The messageboards were used by practically nobody, and were dominated by opinionated bigots.



Still, it's very amusing to see so many haters of the BBC whinging about the loss of a BBC service they clearly adored.

"The decision to close the fivelive messageboards was the right one. The messageboards were used by practically nobody, and were dominated by opinionated bigots."



Is that not a rather bigoted opinion?

27 (mikado) seemed to forget that some of the so called 'haters of the BBC' were licence payers. Why should they be listened to?

"so we're closing the existing 5 live messageboards when 5 live Now goes live."



Has it gone live then?



If so, how can we tell?

5 Live? I thought that had been running for years.



However Jem, do us a favour, stop acting like a SW Trains announcer and try and kid us you're improving the service when you've cancelled the 8:17 to Waterloo. If it was cost saving, or you wanted to give the impression of listener interaction by having your web presence strait-jacketed to what your on-air talent is talking about at this moment, then please say so.

This is terrible. It really is awful. Hard to navigate and apart from the Labour conference the only things teacher will let us naughty children discuss are two human interest stories which, although tragic, are hardly of national importance.



GIVE US BACK THE MESSAGE BOARDS!!

I laughed when it was suggested "Have your say" was an alternative to the message boards. Not only are the topics picked you, there is no guarantee that your comment will get an airing and if it is only after a considerable delay.

I am sorry to have to say that I find this whole new layout so hard to navigate that I can't find my way around it without going back and forward over and over again. I am very disappointed with the whole closure of the messageboards. Once again something that worked well has been taken from us to have a new system imposed that seems to deliberately stop comment and debate. Very sad.

I have to agree with Anthony (must be a first) and Piltdown, simply awful!

Since the message boards have been closed for at least 24 hours now, why is this topic "We're closing the 5 live messageboards" the ONLY topic on "5 Live now"?

What a disaster this new system is !



There are alternatives listed on this thread from the old board :

https://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbfivelive/F2148564?thread=6946171



I'm at Scotsgait - obviously ! - and have signed up at Gavin's Station (tho' it seems to be mainly chit-chat) and, also, at the Grauniad (which I have to thank FG for !!!).



May still pop in here from time to time but only when there's a subject which is of interest to me.

"May still pop in here from time to time but only when there's a subject which is of interest to me"



Which is unlikely given that the topics seem to be solely about Fivelive's presenters

This new 'service' is a disaster, and reflects very poorly on the BBC.



The old service allowed a wide range of views and discussion subjects. The BBC clearly has money coming out of its ears, looking at the salaries it pays, the way it throws money at programmes - never use one presenter in a studio where three reporting live from somewhere else will do - , the purchase of Lonely Planet, etc etc.



The BBC receives a lot of money FROM the public, which its employees make a very nice living from. The boards were an opportunity for the BBC to offer US something in return.



I suspect the fact that the views expressed on the boards so rarely coincided with the BBC's Weltanschauung were the prime reason why they just had to go. The BBC needs to understand that the public's views are more in tune with the tories and UKIP than with the likes of Jeremy Hardy and Mark Steel.

The blog is soooo..... boring. ZZZzzzzzzz......

Where can one now discuss the situation where parents who having lost their daughter to a malign tumour, whose death impacted on the most important vaccination campaign in the last thirty years and caused other people to come crawling out of the woodwork with made up complaints about the vaccine and still manage to retain faith in a made up deity?

Steve, we understood that the only people who read the message board were the contributors. So what?

We were none of us daft enough to imagine that our ramblings were of any significance to anybody. That still doesn't explain why they were closed.

If the BBC can afford 8 SCD boards, why couldn't we have one news board, and a 5Live board, where we could witter away to ourselves. I really don't see the problem.

//But the real problem was that it wouldn't really have made any difference what was discussed on the boards since practically the only people who ever saw the discussion were the participants themselves.//



So how is the situation different with the dozens of boards which have been left open?

#43/44



Thanks for the feedback Steve, this is already more than I have had in over 5 years on the R4 Today and 5Live boards (which says a lot about th BBC's commitment to interactivity....)



If you are trying to get your audience closer that's fine, but starting one topic a day, when on any news day there are going to be lots of issues and breaking news is hardly a replacement for the old messageboards is it?







You say:"It's not a replacement for the boards but it puts the thoughts and views of listeners closer to the programmes themselves and gives them a better chance of influencing the station's output."



I have yet to hear any comment from these blogs being raised on air by a presenter. So I do not believe you are achieving your objective

43. steve_bowbrick



"…the real problem was … practically the only people who ever saw the discussion were the participants themselves…"



Did it occur to you that the provision of the message board space was a service to your licence payers? News continues to be discussed in The Bull (one of the seven The Archers message boards). This discussion is buried in threads like "I've just bought a car" and "I've bought a car too".



If such frivolity can find a home on the BBC why can't Five Live (or Four) manage a solitary News message board?

"Any BBC messageboard host will tell you how hard it is to get BBC staff to visit the boards, where they tend to think they'll find lots of off-topic rants and a fair amount of nastiness. Of course, the same hosts will happily confirm that there's always good stuff on the boards - some of the funniest and sharpest comment I've seen has been on one or other of the BBC boards. But with no one of any influence visiting and with no easy way to make the good stuff visible to others it was only a matter of time before they were closed."



So what you are basically saying is that the boards were closed because no BBC staff could be bothered to visit the boards. I assume therefore that they were all too busy visiting the umpteen other boards that have not been closed?

" But the real problem was that it wouldn't really have made any difference what was discussed on the boards since practically the only people who ever saw the discussion were the participants themselves."

Reply message 43

Apparently some people spent most of their day writing numerous posts ,engaging in endurance contests, believing the one who got the last post on any subject was the "winner".

If you have seen the excellent add on TV with the meerkat trying to manage an IT department frantically punching buttons to block out erroneous messages-then you can imagine what the moderators were going through...

I suspect the closure was an attempt to save the tenuous sanity of the moderators.

Lets hope there will be more relevant and interesting subjects for discussion in future .....at the moment the board reminds me of the time I was in the Utah desert watching tumble weeds blow past the tent.

I thought the general public was on the receiving end of the service provided by the BBC. Instead we have to serve the staff..

Lot of good comments here. I want to take issue with a fairly persistent misapprehension, though. Some people think the boards were closed to suppress a particular viewpoint or inconvenient topics of conversation. But the real problem was that it wouldn't really have made any difference what was discussed on the boards since practically the only people who ever saw the discussion were the participants themselves.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Looks like somebody has forgotten the daiy mail dot com and chruch of england.

Why should private international people would want to influence a british broadcasting service? Influencing people media's job. BBC should stop broadcasting its services in other countries, because the only people who listen to such services are quite handful, those who already agree to what BBC broadcasts, so it really doesnt make any difference.

Was it me?

Yes Trout, it probably was.

43. At 1:54pm on 01 Oct 2009, steve_bowbrick wrote:



What an unmitigatedly telling post. Lazy useless BBC staff could not be bothered to engage in the messageboards 'But with no one of any influence visiting ' you mean then BBC staff. As you would be unaware of the origins of any other reader of the boards. Typical BBC arrogance all round. The root of the entire organisation's problem.



You can be absolutely certain had the various messageboards been on message with the BBC staff they would have taken an interest!



Oh and your programmes are not relevant, few bother to listen to them! The BBC only had that one board left related in any way to its entire news and current affairs output. In return for billions of our money in tax. 'Change' is just a place to hide in for big lazy bad management and organisations.



The public must bow down to the BBC staff and their interests, must try to remember this. Nation will speak unto nation so long as it is filtered by the BBC.

The BBC have been restricting free discussion more and more over the years. They don't like the audience setting the agenda. They want to keep the discussion within the usual narrowly-framed spectrum. e.g. "Was invading Iraq the right thing to do, or was it a mistake?". Other possibilities such as "or was it a war crime" are excluded.



I remember all the promises when the old Have Your Say system was being replaced. We were told that our comments would be appearing straight away. Yet if you take one look at the Have Your Say discussions today (or indeed virtually any day) you will find they are all Fully Moderated (Pre-Censored).



Perhaps that wouldn't be such a bad thing if BBC staff restricted themselves to censoring abusive posts, but the censorship goes far beyond that. Possibly the pinnacle of BBC Censorship occurred during a Have Your Say debate on Google's involvement in Censorship in China. It was a "Reactively Moderated Debate" and some posters started pointing out that the BBC also censors things. The BBC pulled those posts. Then more people posted complaining about the new censorship and the BBC removed those posts too. Eventually the BBC gave up and the top rated posts were all about BBC Censorship. Since that time "Reactively Moderated" debates have become very rare indeed.

Over fed, under worked. I suspect BBC has started to hire the retired soldiers from the two 21st century wars.

"But the real problem was that it wouldn't really have made any difference what was discussed on the boards since practically the only people who ever saw the discussion were the participants themselves."



The main reason for this was the decision by the BBC to stop promoting the boards. The last redesign of the fivelive homepage effectively consigned them to the dustbin, but this was only the final nail on a coffin that had been a long time in the making.



I suspect the real reason was the effort and resources required to police the boards and prevent further situations like the Melanie Phillips/Iron Naz story that blew up several years ago.



Since then I believe the boards were deliberately allowed to 'wither on the vine'.

Here's an idea: why not have a messageboard as normal, with a disclaimer before posting, saying "Views and opinions expressed here in no way reflect the views and opinions of the BBC, its employees or its affiliates". Why does it have to be moderated? Aren't we adult enough? Clearly not.



If BBC employees can't even be bothered to moderate these boards and that's why they're closing, then why the hell were they opened in the first place?! One thing's for sure - this is the end of freedom of speech, such as it was, on the BBC. Make no mistake.

@I_am_I: Unfortunately such a disclaimer would not exempt the BBC from legal action if anything liable/defamatory was posted. There were a number of articles written on this subject a while ago I think on the BBC Internet Blog (though can't find the URL).



I suspect the reason for closure may be partly cost related as https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2009/07/blogs_and_boards_getting_the_b.html indicates that 90% of moderation spend is on boards, compared to 6% on blogs.

From link in Message 60 from TheBroll



"....As you can see from the pie chart above the vast majority of the money we spent on moderation last year was spent on message boards and other communities with a very small slice spent on blogs..."



A possible explanation immediately follows in the same article.



"...Now blogs sometimes attract a lower rate of commenting (and therefore moderation spend) than a board would...."



A cursory inspection of the 5 Live blogs as compared to the (still viewable) message boards shows that the latter attracted considerably more input. So in effect money has been saved by cutting the flow of correspondence, through gating it via a smaller number of topics.

I think the reason that they weren't very well populated was because nobody knew they existed - this blog is the first I've heard of them, and seeing as they're now closed it's irrelevant!



Shame really, have been saying for ages that we need a proper news forum on the BBC rather than the problematic blogs and the laughable HYS.

Blimey! After being a regular participant here for 8 years, I was banned for life by an over-zealous moderator for repeating the BBC's own report on the Max Mosley scandal.... So I joined the Guardian's and Sun's messageboards instead. Shame though. I'll miss Dok Skum, Godless Infidel, Bouncy Helen, Rosie, even wendymann and many more. Maybe catch you guys on one of the other yakboards some time. Take care. - fripono /blessmycottonsocks! La lutta continua!

As I'm not a sports nut and like "grown up" discusions not the "dumbed down" idiocy that is Radio5 I'll stick to Radios3 & 4 and say goodbye to the message boards. Even the BBC local radio stations put Radio5 to shame. What is the target audience (aside from sports fans that is)?

Steve Bowbrick, editor, 5 live blog



Do us all a favour and close this blog.



If you couldn't justify the 5 Live messageboards, where posters could comment on items in the news, a main function of the BBC, how on earth can you justify the expense of the 5 Live Blogs?



Clearly you think the purpose of the public is to serve YOU whereas the proper purpose of the BBC is to serve US, the licence payers.

I never even had a chance to post on them. Awww well I will live

We pay billions of pounds to the BBC for a restricted and very poor service.



We have no control over or say in what is provided by the BBC.



Surely it is time for the BBC to be opened to public scrutiny



We want a service without censorship where we can be heard and without the relentless politically correct propaganda



Lets hope the next government can do this for the people

It's a simple question. Is there a message board left on the BBC where license players can discuss, for example, such topics of the day as Europe, or prison sentences, or immigration, as they arise, rather than relying on them being blog topics at some point? Is the real concern not that if people can start their own topics, some will try to exploit a national service for narrow political interest?