BobaBoard Basics
"BobaBoard will move you and fill you with a feeling of deep peace. I hope your time here will be pleasant and your memories will last forever."
This user guide is living document still under construction. If anything is confusing or unclear, please let us know!
What is BobaBoard?
The Simple Answer: A website featuring a collection of communities, made for fandom by people in fandom.
The Detailed Answer: BobaBoard was born as a response to Tumblr's porn ban and to the increasingly hostile nature of online spaces. BobaBoard's main goal (among many) is to create an open source platform, collaboratively built by fans for fans, that can support the needs of small online communities by being adaptable, stable, and fun to use.
While BobaBoard has a unique take on online communities, its inspirations include Tumblr, Discord, LiveJournal, and many others.
Bobaboard Concepts
Realms
Realms are a recent step in BobaBoard's journey! Our current vision is explained below, but your input will help us shape their future.
Realms are distinct communities within BobaBoard, each with its own management, members, and URL. Only users who have joined a Realm can post and comment in its Boards, but their content is visible to anyone with the link.
BobaBoard's philosophy is to leave, within reasonable limits, ample freedom to each Realm in terms of organization and management. Realms may differ from each other in rules, culture, goals, and user-acceptance criteria; they may have different approaches to tagging, content moderation, and organization, or they may host Realm-only events or contests.
The structure of BobaBoard Realms calls back to various aspects of other platforms. Going down memory lane, each Realm can be thought of as its own forum, with Boards in place of subforums; as a more modern comparison, Discord hosts a multitude of independent communities (servers) which closely parallel Realms; if you've been in fandom a long time, the communities structures might also remind you of LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, or other such clones (but without personal blogs). Despite these similarities, however, BobaBoard also features many features more closely associated with modern social networks.
There are currently two Realms making up BobaBoard:
V0: The Alpha
The OG BobaBoard. A closed Alpha for Ms. Boba's friends, Boba volunteers, and early adopters.
Fandom Coders
The first official "Realm". It's a community of fandom people who also code or want to learn to code, particularly if they use coding in their fandom activities!
For more information on each Realm, visit their sections in the guide.
In the future, there will be opportunities for others to establish their own Realms. While we're still in the very early stages of planning, you can fill out the Realms Interest Form to help us understand the needs of our public and be contacted with future news and surveys.
Boards
Each Realm can contain multiple Boards. Boards are similar to forum sections or Discord channels; they define the broad topics of the Realm, give users a heads-up as to what they can expect to find, and help them avoid or mute topics. To interact in a Realm, you post to a board related to your topic.
In our current culture, we care more about you posting than where you post. If something might fit in more than one place, choose the one that's most appropriate according to your own nebulous criteria.
"The boards are more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules."
At this stage, there's no personal "blog" or "page" on BobaBoard. There's no user address that you can give someone so that they can see all your posts. We're focused on building a better fandom community experience first, but personal solutions might be incorporated in the future.
Using This Guide
BobaBoard's two Realms currently have more in common than not. The information outside of a section dedicated to a Realm pertains to BobaBoard as a whole: shared features, etiquette, and information. For things specific to each Realm (such as Rules), you can find more detailed information in their individual sections.