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Type of site | Digital Arts Community, Message board |
|---|---|
| Owner | Rob Manuel,Cal Henderson, Denise Wilton |
| Created by | Communal |
| URL | b3ta.com |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional, Required to post |
| Launched | 2001 |
B3ta/ˈbiːtə/ (stylised asb3ta) is a popularBritishwebsite,[1] described as a "puerile digital arts community" byThe Guardian.[2] It was founded in 2001 byRob Manuel, Denise Wilton andCal Henderson.
B3ta's main feature is anewsletter featuring the latest work of the B3ta community and other interesting, humorous or perverse things found on the Web. The newsletter has about 100,000 readers.[3] Amessage board allows members to post digital images and short animations they have created, the ones considered the best appearing on the front page, along with various announcements. Previously there was a B3ta radio show on the London stationResonance FM.[3]
Many popularInternet phenomena were created by B3ta members (also called "b3tans or "B3tards"[4]). These include theMacromedia Flash cartoons created byJoel Veitch andJonti Picking, the surrealist animations byCyriak Harris, and the quizzes by Rob Manuel.
A book entitledThe Bumper B3ta Book of Sick Jokes was published in 2006, containing jokes compiled from B3ta contributors and a spin-off wiki humour website, Sickipedia.
On the main board, images and animatedGIFs are posted by the members. The B3ta message board has a strong code of "netiquette" – a new thread should generally not be started unless it contains an image, made by that user and not previously posted to /board. Spamming (promoting a website purely for financial gain) is not tolerated.
Newly registered users cannot post on the board until the Tuesday after they register, known as "Newbie Tuesday". This gives an opportunity to discover site etiquette before getting involved.
Internet memes are the lifeblood of B3ta messageboard. Meme is a name given to a clichéd image that is frequently used in images as a cheap gag. Although many older board members may resent the lack of originality shown by using these clichés, some, such asThe Quo orThe Fear, crop up regularly.
This is a weeklyPhotoshop contest, where images are posted along a certain theme – examples include "New Software Products", or "The World If It Was Run By Kittens". The entries are posted as normal threads on the message board, but are marked with a "C" icon to differentiate from normal posts. Entries are collected in a central repository that can be browsed any time, with the highest voted images displayed first. Three "special mentions" are chosen by the site mods, and these are posted along with the theme of the new challenge in the Friday newsletter.
The challenge topics are alternately chosen by board members, and the "Challenge Dictator" (basically a site moderator) on a two-week cycle.
Image Challenge suggestions appear to be generally listed in order of posting, with the newest responses first. However, whilst a question is open, other users can click "I like this!" which gives a score of one point to that answer. Once a question is closed answers are listed by the number of users who have clicked the "I like this!" on that answer; however, as many answers are submitted each week, most are never clicked on and so are sorted by the time they were posted.
Recognizing that "not everyone wants to muck around with Photoshop", the site asks a question each week hoping to provoke amusing anecdotes. It was originally used as material for the radio show and the newsletter, but realising the popularity of the content, the site owners decided to continue the questions after the close of the show. A new topic is begun every Thursday (at which point it becomes impossible to reply to the previous QOTW) and, as with the other areas of the site, Question of the Week attracts regulars known for their characteristic posts. Each post is voted for in the same way as the image challenge.
The first question was "Worst Record Ever?" posed by Rob Manuel in 2003;[5] examples of questions since include "Why should you be fired from your job?", "Mad Stuff You've Done To Get Someone To Sleep With You" and "Expensive mistakes".
QOTW Off Topic was invented for those users of QOTW who found they had things in common and liked to talk to each other using the reply system. Over several weeks it became clear that more and more people were preferring to chat to each other through the replies instead of the /talk board which was already set up, so Off Topic was created.
The links board[6] is another section of the site that was created in response to an equivalent page on the 4rthur website. This board is a place for b3ta members to share interesting links they have found, in preference to the original practise of posting them on the main board. The links board has itself become a place for particular groups of b3tans ( or "b3tards") to congregate, and for links specific memes to proliferate.
Posting something which is deemed to be clichéd is not tolerated. These cliché links are often referred to as "glasscock", named after the famous image of a female golfer kissing a glass trophy, which appeared to be a phallic shape due to the camera angle. The best images of the day are displayed on the front page of the site, reaching many more people. The Board members vote by clicking a button labelled "I like this!", then the site moderators pick their favourites.[7]
The talk board[8] is identical to the main message board except for the fact that it is not possible to post images. It was created in response to the arrival of4rthur, a (now defunct) talk based offshoot of b3ta which drew a couple of hundred members away, and, more recently,cliqr,Dynafoo (both also defunct now) andc4mbodia. Also, the site owners wanted a place where people could banter without worrying about creating images.
Like the many message boards, the b3ta talk board has developed a clique-like atmosphere, with many users having met one another at so called "B3ta bashes".Oxford in particular has become known amongst members as a bash hotspot, and has developed from a few B3tards getting together for a drink to a genuine spectacle. On 31 May 2008, the biggest "bash" so far took place in Earls Court, London, although this was mainly a messageboard event.
From August 2003 until July 2004, B3ta had its own radio show, which was broadcast fromResonance FM (104.4 FM inLondon, also available via streaming broadcast from the Resonance FM website) between 4pm and 5pm. The show was presented byRob Manuel, a co-owner of the site, and David Stevenson. There were often special guests – sometimes contributors to the site, sometimes semi-famous people, such as the drummer fromBlur,Miles Hunt ofThe Wonder Stuff and "a chap who once played aDalek inDoctor Who".
In 2006, independent publishersThe Friday Project and B3ta launched a venture to publish a collection of "sick jokes" gathered from B3ta contributors. A public wiki site named "Sickipedia" (a pun on "Wikipedia") was established to collectuser-submitted humour for the book.[9] The site encouraged submission of jokes intended to be bad taste ortaboo, and entries were organised under a categorisation system of topics which includedracism, jokes aboutcelebrities,current affairs andsexual humour.[10] Similarly to the main B3ta site, Sickipedia site functionality offered an electronic voting system to subject user submissions to a form ofpeer review.
The book, entitledThe Bumper B3ta Book of Sick Jokes, was published on 20 October 2006 and was made available from both online and real-world bookshops. It claims to offer an "antidote" topolitical correctness.[11] The book is now published byHarperCollins.[12]
The Sickipedia site was sold in 2012.[13] The new owners released an ebook and a print-on-demand book in 2014 entitledThe Best Of Sickipedia: A Collection Of The Sickest, Most Offensive and Politically Incorrect Jokes, along with mobile apps.[14] In February 2016, the Sickipedia website went offline due to a drive failure,[15] resulting in the apps also failing.
Virgin asked B3ta to run an image competition in which board members could winPlayStation Portables and anXbox 360 for creating something on the theme "What would happen if you said Yes to everything?". Virgin later cancelled the challenge early because they did not like some of the images being created, includingRichard Branson urinating onRob Manuel, dressed in baby clothes.[16]
On 4 June 2007, a b3ta member posted an "alternative logo" for the2012 Summer Olympics in London, which referenced an image from the formershock sitegoatse. TheBBC then posted this logo on its website and ran it on itsBBC News 24 channel as part of a viewer-submitted contest.[17][18]
In November 2007, lawyers acting forPrince threatened the site and its members with legal action over an image challenge.[19]
A Sickipedia joke about strickenBolton Wanderers midfielderFabrice Muamba on the evening of his cardiac arrest on the pitch atWhite Hart Lane caused outrage on Twitter.[20] In February 2009, the site was criticized as "monstrous" for its jokes about the death ofFrancesca Anobile, and one of the site's users reported "very real threats of legal action".[21] In October 2012, a 19-year-old fromChorley,Lancashire, was jailed for copying and pasting Sickipedia jokes about abducted childrenApril Jones andMadeleine McCann onto Facebook.[22]
