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Informed Consent: Ten Years On
IC's founder writes about the scene in 1997 and the creation of the
website.
The Informed Consent website dates back to Christmas week in 1997, and now
at the tenth anniversary of that time, I thought I'd write something about
how IC came about and how it has evolved over the years.
BDSM in 1997
1997 was the year I started making contact with people in the BDSM scene,
rather than just doing bits of BDSM with individuals or reading and posting
about it online.
Manchester did already have one monthly fetish event, Mistress
Chrissie's at Legend's "Chains" venue (where Club Lash now is), but as a
dresscode and mainly fetish event, I never made it along before it closed
down sometime in 1998. I'm sure there were other fetish events in the
Gay Village as well, including ones organised by the Motorcycle Club.
But I was really looking for D/s, and that was only really visible online,
especially in the US. I could find one UK D/s chatroom on IRC
(#submissionuk on DALnet) and one general UK BDSM channel (#bdsmuk on IRCnet).
Both had websites run by chatroom regulars: #submissionuk had an official
website run by Searcher, Savage-UK was run by Drow and extremis, and
Fetish-net UK by Psycloud. These sites had a mixture of stories, essays and
a handful of pictures, and in the case of #submissionuk, details of their
monthly face-to-face meetings in London.
The #submissionuk meetings were organised by Searcher in the upstairs room
of the White Horse pub in Soho on the second Saturday evening each month.
This was the first regular munch in the UK, although it was never called by
that name, and there had been one-off munches
organised by posters of alt.sex.bondage going back to 1994.
In June 1997 I took the train to Euston, spent a day nosing around
Bloomsbury and Charing Cross Road bookshops, and then summoned up my
courage to walk
into the meeting room of the White Horse. The #submissionuk meetings had the
unfortunate habit of facing newcomers with a wall of faces and the request
to "guess our online nicknames" which I managed to stumble through (munch
meeters and greeters take note
 ) Once I'd settled down to actually
talking with people I enjoyed it, and ended up staying past the last train
and spending the night reading in Euston station. I think some people were
heading off to the Gate that night (which is a membership based club) and I
was vaguely aware of the Skin Two and the Rubber Ball and the existence of
other fetish events and presumably shops, but there was no obvious way to
discover all this then - although with hindsight, a copy of Skin Two or
a fetish shop carrying flyers would
have been a good place to start, if I could have found one.
Back in Manchester I continued with one-to-one BDSM and started thinking
about how to make things better. There were obviously lots of BDSM people out
there online, but very few going to face-to-face events.
The Web
I'd been using the web and creating webpages since 1993, back when NCSA Mosaic
was the hot new graphical browser, and when I discovered the alt.sex.bondage
newsgroup about the same time, it was obvious the two things were going to
come together: everyone would be able to publish to the world without
newspapers, magazines and publishing houses getting in the way; and everyone
would be able to read what they liked, not just the topics that old media
editors thought were important or appropriate for public consumption. This
was a radical idea at the time, when Time Out and national newspapers
even refused to accept classified ads "of a sadomasochistic nature".
So eventually I decided that I was going to try to tie it all
together in the UK via the web, and create a listings site that people
(including and especially me!) could use to find out what was going on.
In December 1997 I started off with a handful of pages called
"UK BDSM" and using a crossword logo, and over the years these
grew step by step into today's IC.
I had the first version finished and uploaded
to a free tripod.com account
by Christmas Day 1997, which is now counted as Day Zero of IC.
The main content of the site was a page of links to the handful of shops,
publications, events and online forums that had websites. These were split
up into sections with some explanatory text, and the section titles included
"IRC channels etc", "uk.people.bdsm newsgroup", "Events", and "Equipment".
Eventually these headings would grow into the various sections of the UK
Listings on IC today.
uk.people.bdsm and munches
For most of 1997, 1998 and 1999 uk.people.bdsm was the UK's main BDSM
discussion forum, after being formed by Amethyst in March 1997. The group
slowly grew in popularity during that year, and one of its strongest
features was Amethyst's events list, which included details of many events
without any online presence of their own. Eventually Amethyst stepped down
from maintaining the list and I took over the job of compiling it in
March 1998. The events list then became a regular weekly feature of the group,
and was reproduced on my UK BDSM site and posted out by email. This list
evolved into the Event Dates listing on IC today which is also still posted
out by email every week on Thursdays.
February 1998 also saw the first Manchester Munch,
at the Rope and Anchor pub near Warrington.
I spent the last few days of January driving around
near the M6/M62 junction looking for a suitable venue, as I expected most
people to come by car. The first munch was attended by only eleven people,
but some had come from Scotland, London, Leeds, Sheffield and the Merseyside.
I also took the decision to call it a "munch" from the start, unlike the
London #submissionuk meetings, as it made it
easier to explain as I could link to all the US sites talking about their
munches. I did think about how to make us easier to find in the pub: some US
munches used black balloons, but I thought that would raise too many
questions so came up with a Manchester A-Z map book instead. A lot of IC's
initial growth was intertwined with the munch and the network of munches
that spread across the country, fuelled by uk.people.bdsm. This first of
these was the Sheffield Munch that took place the Sunday after the second
Manchester Munch in March. Initially most of the uk.people.bdsm munches were
one-offs, but eventually almost everyone settled down to a monthly formula
and people became less and less keen about travelling several hundred miles
just to see other BDSM people face-to-face.
March also saw the website's name changed to Informed Consent, and
in June 1998 the site moved to www.informedconsent.co.uk after a short stay
at a Demon Internet address.
Content from users
Most of the content of the site came from details which I collected myself or
which were contributed by other people by email. During 1998 I experimented with
adapting a guestbook program as a primitive web board. This was billed as
a place for asking (and answering!) questions about BDSM, but quickly became
overrun with personal ads. At the time, newsgroups like uk.people.bdsm were
also repeatedly spammed by personals, and it's become a recurrent and
unfortunate theme that one of the first groups to use any new system (event
listings, weblogs, instant chat systems etc) are men abusing it with
personals 
Eventually, I realised that any interactive BDSM site needs a place to post
personal ads. There may be no point to it, and guys may never have any
success just with listings, but if they don't have somewhere to post "This is
slave joe, mail me to find out more" they'll swamp other sections with ads.
And so the proto-board changed to personal ads and discussion, and the
discussion posts were dotted here and there amongst the ads. Most discussion was
still on uk.people.bdsm, which had the great advantage that it could be
downloaded and then read and posted to offline by people with a
pay-per-minute dialup connection.
During 1999 IC continued to grow in popularity, and gained a detailed
list of UK BDSM and Fetish shops, both offline and online, including a
near definitive list of fetish shops donated by John North from his website.
These various listings of shops, events, groups, other websites etc were
growing in size and becoming more complicated to compile and keep up to date.
I was very aware that there were some big gaps, especially London events
and shops that weren't up to speed with the internet yet, and that other
items carried on in the listings long after they had shut down. For
instance, Mistress Chrissie's in Manchester marched on in the weekly events
list for several months after it's eventual closure.
The key to solving these kind of difficulties as a website scales up in size
is to involve more people, and with the listings the obvious people were the
event organisers, shop owners etc. The listings web pages were already
composed using a program (rather than each being a file edited by hand), and
I experimented with a system giving people a numeric PIN number so they
could contributed listings items and then change them in the future if
necessary. Unfortunately, only one person (Matt from Violate in Glasgow) was
brave enough to try this out and I carried on compiling the listings myself
during the summer of 1999.
Building IC.1
During that time I read "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" by
Philip Greenspun, which promoted the idea of websites that had databases
behind them storing the content of the site, and then programs to convert
those databases into pages "on the fly" every time a particular page is
viewed. This sounds totally obvious now, but at the time it was restricted
to big sites like Amazon, Yahoo and Hotmail.
I realised that I could make a site which people signed-into (like Hotmail)
but with a nickname (like IRC chatrooms) rather than an email address. They
could then browse around the pages of the site, and the system could offer
them options to edit some pages - for instance, their own profile page or
listings items that they had contributed. I had a vague idea that this would
create a lot of "synergy": new people would join the site to put up a
personal, would use the listings to find events, get out and about, and then
when they came to start their own event, shop etc, they'd contribute the
details to the listings themselves. This way the site would grow and grow
under its own steam, sucking in people and information and helping to drive
the expansion of the public scene in the UK.
To do any of this I needed a database, and at the time I didn't believe there
were
any open source databases that were simple enough for a small website like
IC. So I broke one of Greenspun's rules: I hacked together my own database
based on plain text files. It lasted surprisingly well (only running out of
steam around the end of 2004.) On this foundation, I built a sign-in system,
personal ads, and editable-listings, and relaunched the site with this
"IC.1" software in October 1999, with 250 people joining in the first week.
Also in October I started an #informedconsent chatroom on bondage.com's IRC
network which quickly became one of the busiest chatrooms on that
(worldwide) network dedicated to BDSM.
Discussion lists and boards remained quite fluid for the first few years.
The original guest book system was retired when "IC.1" went live, and after
another brief attempt at web boards, I settled down to mailing lists using
the Onelist system that merged with eGroups and eventually became Yahoo
Groups. When Yahoo started deleting adult groups, especially BDSM ones, I
moved the lists to IC itself and this continued until the web boards of
IC.2 were introduced in 2005.
However, from October 2000 IC also had a self-contained weblogs system that
users could use for journals and a few of the current weblogs date back to
this time. This provided a lot of freedom for people with limited computing
skills to publish their opinions, news, event reviews etc to others in the
scene in the UK, and was the busiest part of the site until the web boards
came back in 2005.
During 2001-2003 there some more minor changes to the site, but no major new
features. At the start of 2004 I added profile pictures for users and up to
then there were no images on the whole site apart from a few in the handful
of essays on BDSM subjects. Now only four years on this sounds like a visual
desert, but before broadband a lot of sites had minimal graphics.
Building IC.2
In February 2004 the new phenomenon of social networking sites was coming to
the fore and I wrote a weblog about how that might be relevant to IC, and
how it could allow people to find mutual friends who might provide
references and how that could make it harder for fakers, fantasists and
timewasters.
As I was thinking this through, it became clear the IC.1 plain text database
system wasn't up to the task, and that I would need to rewrite everything to
use a proper relational database. This was a very big job, but it would also
give me the chance to tidy up a lot of loose ends and make it much easier to
add more features in the future.
In June and July I bit the bullet and started coding up the new database
handling and page building layers, and then worked through all the old and
new subsystems one by one: profiles, settings, personals, weblogs, networks,
listings, pictures, memos, and web boards. This work took until the end of
December 2004.
Early January saw lots of testing of the whole system, with the three of us
sending each other memos and replying to each other's posts on the test
version of the site. I then had the job of writing programs to convert the old
IC.1 database to the IC.2 format, as I was determined not to present people
with a page saying "We've upgraded everything: you need to re-enter your
details again."
IC.2 finally went live on the 18th of January 2005. Networks were added and
features like memos and web boards that are expected of community forums
these days were all finally included. Since then the only major new
subsystem has been the ICchat rooms and private instant messages. Some other
sections, such as the listings, have been rewritten in the last two years,
but not in ways that are very noticeable to users and mostly to keep up with
the growth of the site.
IC today
As part of this growth, I've now stepped back from the day to day
running of the site (hence all the requests to contact Admin rather than
any individual!) and as I write in December 2007, we're now getting
around 5000 people signing-in per day, and between 100 and 200 people
joining each day. I certainly didn't expect to be creating anything this
big, and the effect of the web boards in rounding out the site for the
various BDSM communities rather than just providing listings has changed the
feel of the place and its prominence in the scene. But of all the things
IC.2 brought, the one I'm most pleased with is the BDSM Activism board, and
the way it allows BDSM people to respond rapidly when news stories about us
are published on sites that allow viewer comments. There's nothing more
gratifying than seeing some journalist mouth off about us, only to be faced
with tens of comments saying "wait a minute, who exactly are we harming with
any of this?"
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