BoyChat Technical Committee

The BoyChat Technical Committee was a problem-solving group founded and hosted by Brother Bonzo in March of 1997 while Sean007 was webmaster.

While the name sounds quite formal, it was not in any way "official". BoyChat at the time was owned and operated by whomever decided to take on the responsibility of being webmaster. Sean007 was webmaster at the time when Bonzo formed the committee but Sean was not a member of the committee. Bonzo's group represented entirely volunteer and spontaneous grassroots efforts by the participants of BoyChat, who already had developed a feeling of ownership toward the board. Over the years, this sense of group ownership has often manifested itself.

History

Bonzo formed the group to explore solutions to various software problems then plaguing the board. BoyChat's Perl posting script, slightly modified from a version published by Matt Wright in late 1995, was not entirely suited to high posting volumes. Often when two participants posted messages at about the same time, the index would become scrambled. This phenomenon became known informally as the Script Monster.

Bonzo and TPKA not implemented a few fixes to the script over time that minimized the Script Monster problem but did not eliminate it entirely. Some long-time BoyChat participants may remember receiving a cryptic message from time to time asking them to repost their message. This was a result of the modifications they implemented. However, the problem did not go away completely until Camper wrote an entirely new posting script. Bonzo and TPKA not also eventually solved the imposter problem by implementing sigpics as a modification to the original script.

The BoyChat Technical Committee existed until May of 1997 when Jimf3, a member of the committee and assistant webmaster of BoyChat, invited all members to join the new BoyChat Steering Committee in response to the Digiweb hosting crisis. Bonzo donated a message board for the new organization which took on all the functions of the old technical committee, plus fundraising and hosting responsibilities. It eventually evolved into the Free Spirits Committee.