The Forum at ABBA - The Site closes down - where is a fan to go?
On October 10th, ABBA fans visiting the official ABBA site were stunned to find the following message:“Dear visitors to ABBA - The Site,
“It is with great regret that we see ourselves forced to close the Forum section at this site, effective immediately.“Although the Forum moderators do a great job in managing the Forum, it also requires a lot of attention from Polar Music. Since there are many alternate places on the Internet for fans to interact (discussion forums, mailing lists etc.), we feel that our time is better used focusing on other aspects of ABBA - The Site, as well as the many exciting ABBA releases we have planned for the future.
“We want to thank our site members for their many contributions to the Forum over the years. An extra special thanks to the moderators - without their dedicated work the Forum could not have existed.”Unofficial internet forums, chat rooms and mailing lists immediately exploded with shock, surprise and speculation about why the forum was closed so suddenly and without warning. Despite a number of popular theories, it seems that it’s as simple as the announcement said: there was no one particular reason for the forum’s sudden closure, and it certainly wasn’t any recent posts that had any input into the final decision, which was probably made long before the forum was actually closed.
Fans need not despair, as there are many other ABBA forums where fans can get together, interact, and talk ABBA 24 hours a day, seven days a week.The Abbasite4ever forum was started almost immediately by a small group of regular contributors to ABBA – The Site’s forum. This has become very popular and has effectively become a mirror of the official site forum, with a similar tone, topics and many former ABBA site members.
ABBAMAIL’s forum is a popular alternative forum for fans looking for something with a less reverent view of ABBA.
Club ABBA is a new site with a forum that has been slow to start, but is attracting more fans.
The ABBA Express forum focuses more towards collecting, though there is still general discussion about ABBA.
Other popular and active forums include Let The Music Speak and ABBA Story.
Among the foreign language forums are ABBAfórum in Hungarian, ABBA Italia in, of course, Italian, but it also has a section for English speakers, and, for Russian speakers, there is ABBA Net and ABBA – Legend of the Century!, both busy forums.
A version of this article appeared in the December 2006 issue of the Official International ABBA Fan Club Magazine.
