Here's a subject of marginal interest to bead collectors -- the history of online bead forums.  At first, Dr. Francis' Beadsite was the only major forum operating.  This forum was attached to a regular website offering articles about beads and a variety of other bead-related information.  Then along came the NBS forum and, when this latter forum made it easy to post pictures and used the cascading thread structure, it became the most popular and widely used forum.  The success of NBS was due to its ease of use and the total lack of rules and censorship.  The Beadsite lacked rules too -- no one ever got blocked -- but it was just too hard to use.

By and by, the BCN people made a forum, but it languished because most of the action was at NBS.  But then NBS started to have technical problems and went down, so everyone switched over to BCN.  Then the Show-and-Tell people took over, censorship and insecurities crept in, and participation changed.  Then NBS came back for awhile and, once again, free speech, debate, criticism, etc. flourished.  NBS crapped out again, but the BCN people reconstructed it because they realized that Show-and-Tell is boring.  So now they had two forums:  BCN and NBS.  All seemed fine!

After awhile, the ongoing attacks against bead fraud on eBay led to a situation where the BCN people got co-opted by the nefarious eBay billionaires who care about nothing but their own bottom line.  The BCN people, basking in self-importance, turned on the bead community and started enforcing unjust and legally unenforceable eBay policies.   The NBS got closed down and no one was willing to pick it up, I think for technical reasons -- the realization that the BCN sellouts would be required to manage the site and, therefore, there would be no freedom of speech.

So now, a year later, we have the BCN, operated by eBay toadies, visited by obsequious Show-and-Tell hobbyists, and dominated by the world's only "bead researcher" who can't handle debate and criticism and who thinks he's the first, last, and only word on bead matters.

What a joke the bead forum has become!  No more debate, no more criticism, no more exposing fraud.  Let's watch this BCN forum languish, back to where it was when NBS (Thanks, Quick!) ruled the roost!