TheOriginOf.com

MASALABOARD

April 18, 2007 – 7:01 pm

MASALA BOARD

 

Masala Board is the leader in message boards dedicated to Indian movies. The domain MasalaTalk.com was created in February 2000 with a simple aim to be the forerunner among the communities catering to Bollywood and Indian movie lovers by providing latest news and information about everything related to Bollywood. Masala Chat which was already popular on IndianMasala.com was moved to MasalaTalk.com and Masala News was added to Masala Board. For providing the message board service CoolBoard.com’s free message board was used.

Initially posts on Masala Board could be posted by anyone irrespective of the fact whether he was registered member or not. After a while registration with CoolBoard.com was made mandatory in order to post on Masala Board. The popularity of the Board can be gauged by the fact that by March 2000 there were more than 1000 registered users on Masala Board many of them posting for first time in their life. The success and popularity of Masala Board on Cool Board was such that it was given a preferred member status by Cool Board.

Masala board was filled with posts requesting/soliciting/offering nude or semi nude pictures of Indian actresses. It was very common to find posts like “I want some nude pics of “some” actresses, pls reply with email to receive those pics” or “I want some nude pics of so and so actress, please mail them to me….my email id is…..”. Along with members like these Masala Board had some really good members who made Masala Board such a success. Some of the members who ought to be mentioned are “navelover” (yeah there is one L!), “priapus”, “artguy”, “999466” and several others. Each member had his/her own style and a fan following of their own.

When Masala Board was getting popular, a member named Manmohana created a lot of trouble on the board. Manmohana (possibly along with his friends) used to start a thread on Madhuri Dixit pretending to be her fan, but soon the thread would turn nasty with nasty things being talked about the actress. There used to be debates and abuses on other topics as well. Some more users started posting with user names similar to those of reputed members of the board such as “priyapus” for “priapus” and “navellover” for “navelover” to confuse the people reading posts and to make their posts look more credible. The interesting part was all these users were using only one IP address (in essence they were using a single computer for all the user ids!). All the user ids posting inflammatory messages were banned by the administrator.

As the Masala Board’s basic theme was masala (spice), there had to be spicy news in the message board but things started getting out of control with people posting messages that included profanities like “F**k”, “C**t”, “P**sy” etc. Cool Board had a policy to terminate message boards containing material of adult nature as it used to host advertisements on the message board and it looks inappropriate for an advertisement to appear along with material of adult nature. Due to fear of being banned by Masala Board for hosting adult content, the administrator exercised his powers and edited posts and requested members to cooperate with him on this issue.

On September 21, 2000 the administrator announced that he would be locking threads which are in contravention of the policy to avoid profanities. A member of Masala Board, “Hotbabes”, expressed his displeasure of the censorship being imposed by the moderator and would start his own board on similar line. Some members of repute, like “Dayavaan” and “warez222” decided to support “Hotbabes”.  Within a week a new board with name of “Hot Board” was started on CoolBoard by Hotbabes and Dayavaan.

When in April 2001 Cool Board decided announced that it was stopping the free message board service administrator decided to use vBulletin, a message board software, while Hot Board decide to move onto Aimoo, another free message board service provider.