DataLounge

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DataLounge

URL	http://www.datalounge.com
Slogan	14 long years of being so much better last year
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Internet forum
Registration	Optional
Available language(s)	English
Owner	Mediapolis
Created by	Mediapolis
Launched	May 1995
Current status	active

The DataLounge is an Internet forum for LGBT news and gossip with approximately 6.5 million page views each month according to its Webmaster (as of June 2006^[update]).^[1] Mediapolis, a New York City-based interactive media company, created the site in May 1995.

The DataLounge's style stems from a core community of predominantly anonymous posters who share news, opinions, gossip, personal histories and political views from a gay and lesbian perspective. While the forum guidelines formally require posters to respect others, much of the site's fun revolves around its appreciation of wit and satire, as well as its shared history and in-jokes.

Contents 1 History and site policies 2 Culture 3 Moderation and rules 4 Banned topics 5 The Marcia Cross incident 6 Posters of note 7 References 8 External links

[edit] History and site policies

DataLounge was launched by Mediapolis in May, 1995. During the site's early years, content included GLBT-oriented news, gossip, links to other sites/services, and editorial content that made it a gay Web portal. Content contributors included New York drag queen Trudy and journalist Chris Barillas. DataLounge affiliated itself via the DataLounge Network with other web sites such as the gay dating site Edwina.com, gay Web guide Homorama, and GLBT health information site Gay Health, offering information and services to GLBTs. A weekly e-mail was also offered to users. The site evolved to have several discussion forums covering topics such as lesbian, religious and sexual issues, and also created a "Flames and Freaks" forum to house threads that site administrators determined to be disruptive to general forum discussion. Forums created for subpopulations such as The Lord of the Rings fans and US daytime drama aficionados were subsequently closed. The most popular forum was the Gossip Forum, which dwarfed all others in both traffic and number of discussion threads created.

A portion of DataLounge and the DataLounge Network's content came as a result of the integration of some of the 1995-97 content of Out.com from Out Magazine, who announced in March 1997 that it was closing its web site to focus on print content. Out.com users were redirected to DataLounge, and DataLounge administrators adopted Out.com's discussion forums, dating service, and weekly survey.^[2]

In 2003, DataLounge instituted a subscription service which blocked all web banner and pop-up advertising for a $12 annual fee (this fee was subsequently raised to $15, then to the present price of $18).

In 2005, DataLounge was given a major redesign. All forum topics were collapsed into one general discussion forum called "The DataLounge Forum," and all news content, most references to the other sites in the DataLounge Network, and other features were discontinued. Editorial commentary discussing events continues to appear on the site. Users were also given the option to control aspects of the site's layout, including filtration of political, gossip, and/or "Flames and Freaks" threads.

With this redesign came a policy change that limited access to the DataLounge Forum during high-traffic "primetime" periods to fee-paying subscribers. This move was met with controversy amongst DataLounge users, as non-subscribers were blocked from the DataLounge Forum during these periods. Though Mediapolis has received complaints about the policy, specifically that "primetime" periods are irregular and can often occur at times when site traffic should be at its slowest (e.g., North American overnight hours), DataLounge administrators assert that the "primetime" is necessary to prevent slowdowns of the other sites which Mediapolis hosts on the same servers, and preserves the existence of the DataLounge forum by generating revenue to cover DataLounge's hosting, bandwidth and maintenance expenses.

In the summer of 2007 DataLounge instituted a policy that only paying members may start new threads, but in May 2009 DataLounge launched another comprehensive redesign of the site, dubbed "V6," one that allows users to embed photos and YouTube videos, as well as mark specific threads to watch. The new site is auto-refreshed in real-time as new posts are written, and nonpaying members were at first permitted to start threads, but that quickly changed. The DataLounge Webmaster explained in introducing the redesigned site that the transition was largely dictated by the effect of tabbed Web browsing, which resulted in users constantly using their browsers' refresh function and overloading the servers, sending the site into constant primetime mode. However, shortly after launching V6, the Webmaster reinstituted primetime, in part due to the quick proliferation of racist troll posts.

[edit] Culture

Over the course of its history DataLounge has enjoyed, and fiercely debated, posts from dozens of named posters. Some named posters are authenticated, meaning that they have verified their username and obtained a password so no other users can post under their name, but most of the site's authenticated posters have gradually disappeared over time, often due to weariness of constant attacks from anonymous posters.

Anonymous visitors can insert any arbitrary name into the "username" field. This is often used to great comedic effect.

DataLounge has many trolls. The term "troll" is used on DataLounge to describe posters obsessed with a certain subject, even when it's benign, as well as the classic kind of Internet troll.

[edit] Moderation and rules

The DataLounge forum is largely self-moderated via debates amongst posters, and since most posts are anonymous viciousness does occur, though face slapping is discouraged. Many DataLounge posters become violently pedantic where matters of improper grammar, punctuation and spelling are concerned. Some threads are locked by the Webmaster, however, and a few are deleted outright, particularly those which criticize the site's management. For most of its history DataLounge had a system of "redtagging" trolls. When posters were tagged, each of their previous and subsequent posts are tagged with a number in red text so that they become publicly identified. This prevented the majority of trolls from stirring flamewars by, for instance, "talking to themselves" (e.g., posting anonymously on their own threads while pretending to be different individuals). Although the V6 version of DataLounge has a "ff" button, short for "Flames & Freaks," to report trolls to the Webmaster, and in past incarnations could be used to create a redtag for a particular post even in the Webmaster's absence, as of yet no redtags have appeared on V6. It is not known whether redtags are now gone for good.

[edit] Banned topics

DataLounge has few written rules, but a number of standards have evolved, and the site's Webmaster has openly stated at various intervals that discussion of certain topics would result in the threads being deleted and its posters potentially banned from posting anything on the site.

Although the point of it remains a matter of periodic debate, daytime drama (or soap opera) discussions have been forbidden for many years due to earlier soap discussions devolving to flamewars, rampant homophobia and for taking up too many site resources. DataLounge once had a dedicated "Daytime Dish" forum for soap-related discussions, but word of the forum quickly spread to other soap-fan Web sites, all of which are, unlike DataLounge, moderated or forbid anonymous posts. The problem with this incursion was twofold: most of the new visitors were heterosexual housewives, many of whom made openly homophobic remarks (in particular when the sexual orientation of certain actors was brought up), and soap fans invaded the site to the extent that Daytime Dish was consuming over 90% of DataLounge's entire bandwidth, according to the Webmaster. As a result, he closed the Daytime Dish forum and banned soap talk on the main DataLounge discussion board.

Certain subversive threads, in which the original poster makes a veiled reference to a particular soap opera that only regular watchers of it would catch, have popped up from time to time, but in nearly every instance have ended up locked or deleted. Although the Webmaster has allowed most banned topics to return to discussion after a period of time -- discussion of "Lord of the Rings" actors, for instance, was once banned as a result of a group of posters, later revealed to consist mainly of lonely heterosexual housewives, starting a seemingly endless number of threads speculating about sexual liaisons between the films' various male stars, but is once again permitted now that the films and many of their stars most discussed, in particular Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan, have faded from the limelight -- soap opera discussions have remained categorically banned.

Right-wing propaganda threads, particularly those written by so-called "freepers" (members of the Free Republic Internet forum), are also often locked or deleted. Threads incorporating detailed discussions of certain bodily functions tend to be locked quickly as well, as do those that dissolve into flamewars or chatter between a small number of posters. Threads are also locked at the discretion of site administrators should they conclude that a thread was started solely to foment anger or to provide bait for trolls.

In June 2009, shortly after the launch of DataLounge V6, the Webmaster issued a dictum of three new "bannable offenses" that would result in both the threads being deleted and offending posters being banned from the site. The first is mentioning a poster nicknamed "Noodles" for his penchant of describing male genitalia with the term. Although Noodles never authenticated himself or posted with the actual username "Noodles," he was widely believed to have written a series of posts following three general memes: "Dateline: Noodle," which detailed encounters with men on the street believed to have large genitalia unencumbered by the confines of underwear; "'Frau Revenge," in which Noodles was on the receiving end of a perceived slight from a straight woman, invariably young and overweight, and retorted with a sassy comeback seemingly derived from a low-rent 1950s comedy film; and a series of depictions of public sex in unlikely Manhattan locales such as the bathroom at the Upper West Side's Zabar's deli and the cab of a MTA subway train. All were dismissed by most posters as fantasy, and a caricature of Noodles as a sexless, "muumuu-wearing queen" quickly emerged. Soon Noodles begat the so-called "Anti-Noodles Troll," though it is unknown whether one or multiple posters assumed this identity. Noodles' sex threads were the apparent catalysts that set the Anti-Noodles Troll(s) off, and they eventually began deriding nearly every sex-related thread -- which often appear multiple times daily on the site -- as Noodles' imaginary handicraft, invariably devolving into heated arguments, some spanning hundreds of posts, over whether the threads' original posters were, in fact, Noodles. Finally, the Webmaster decided to shut down the arguments by instituting a categorical ban on accusing any poster of being Noodles.

The second new bannable offense is equating anal sex with the deviant sexual practice scat. The third is similar to the Noodles ban: a restriction on accusing posters of being a so-called "Elaborate Scenario Troll" (commonly abbreviated as "EST"). The site did once have an EST, a poster who deployed florid, overwrought prose to describe painstakingly elaborate situations requiring DataLoungers' consult, ones widely believed, as with Noodles' posts, to be fictional. The true EST is believed to have posted only a handful of threads -- unlike Noodles, who is believed to have started dozens -- but DataLoungers quickly started accusing any poster detailing an unusually lengthy account of a given situation as being an EST creating a fake post.

[edit] The Marcia Cross incident

DataLounge was in the news in February 2005, when a "friendly spy" claiming to work at the ABC television network, posted that actress Marcia Cross would come out as gay in an upcoming issue of The Advocate. Within days the rumor had spread like wildfire and garnered mentions in the media including CNN and Fox Television's Los Angeles affiliate, before Cross denied the rumors in an interview with Barbara Walters and her co-hosts on The View. The Advocate published an article chronicling this incident. ^[3] Less than six months later, Cross announced her engagement to stockbroker Tom Mahoney, leading to widespread speculation on DataLounge that Cross -- believed by most posters to be a closeted lesbian, owing to both direct accusations made by gossip columnist and DataLounge user Michael Musto and the fact that she had not, to anyone's public knowledge, dated a man since her then-boyfriend Richard Jordan died of a brain tumor in 1993 -- had entered into a relationship of convenience at the urging of her PR team in order to squash the gay rumors about her.

[edit] Posters of note

Mrs. Betty Bowers - "America's Best Christian." Betty has her own widely-read satirical Web site, but also posts periodically on DataLounge.

Gay writer and critic David Ehrenstein used to post on DataLounge using his authenticated name. He periodically reappears on the site, but as of late has been the target of myriad chides due to his authoring of an op-ed called "Barack the Magic Negro,", a term later appropriated by racist Republicans for nefarious uses during the 2008 United States presidential campaign.

Michael Musto has posted on DataLounge in the past, and has used items from the forum in his Village Voice column. He has also used his column to refute rumors posted on DataLounge, including the purported romantic relationship between "Queer as Folk" stars Gale Harold and Randy Harrison. ^[4] Musto first learned of right-leaning gay commentator Andrew Sullivan posting an advertisement on the site Barebackcity.com, using the now-notorious screen handle "Milky Loads," via a thread on DataLounge before breaking the story in his column in May, 2001 ^[5].

Rosie O'Donnell has mentioned visits to DataLounge in print magazine interviews. ^[6]

Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS CEO Tom Viola has posted when there has been gossip surrounding events involving his organization.

Author and MSNBC gossip columnist Jeannette Walls openly posted on DataLounge, but ceased doing so after being harassed for using DataLounge-sourced items in her columns.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• DataLounge front page
• Mediapolis Press website