The Mormons who run Typophile shut it down for a reboot on its 15th anniversary. How do you fix it? You probably don’t.
I’ve been here before: I spent months back in 2010 compiling bugs (full list). There was no way to report those bugs, least of all by a MetaTalk-like forum. So I posted them individually all on the same day, which caused old men on the site to lose their shit. (They thought I had banged them out all in one go.) Some bugs were fixed.
Last year, the Mormons who run Typophile banned me from the site. (I’d long since been blocked on Twitter.) I was accused of having contributed nothing to typography – despite my publication history, my lectures, my status as the canonical source about TTC and caption/subtitle typography, my actual paid research, and 30 years in the field. The fact that I’m gay and curse like a sailor of course had nothing to do with these religious fundamentalists’ carefully considered, not-at-all-rash action.
Hrant H. Papazian, the most hated man in typography, was never banned from Typophile (or Typo‑L or any other forum). So give me a break that I have contributed nothing. At least I don’t wear magic fucking underwear.
Fixes:
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No Mormons or prudes. A discussion forum cannot be run by religious fundamentalists or prudes. Mormons are both.
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Document who owns and runs the site. No cute catchphrases like “Typophile is a Punchcut gig.” On a page with an easily predicted URL (
typophile.com/about/), list in plain words who runs the site and how to contact them. Ideally that won’t be Joe Pemberton or any member of the LDS Church. Nor will it be the trigger-happy Stephen Coles, who has his fingers in too many pies as it is. (And for saying that, he’ll ban me from Typedrawers.) -
Run a bug forum and run something like MetaTalk. This is another way of saying “Stop doing what is known not to work.”
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Fix the codebase and character encoding.
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And finally, discontinue Typophile. Every Mormon dog has its day (and, posthumously, its own world to rule over like a lord). Keep the archives online in perpetuity. In fact, donate them to the Internet Archive and elsewhere.