Throughout The Keep's existence there were various attacks from homophobes, none very creative, logging on and spewing hate language would get them and their IP address banned, writing various hate messages on the boards. Attacks from without (Homophobes and fake Lesbians) The Keep opened to the public in April 1994 and shutdown December 1995.Īt the end we had over 100,000 unique ids created which probably translated into about 10,000 unique users, primarily LGBT with allies and questioning people also visiting. You could block a user and not see any information about them, and all users could create a short profile. Administrators were called Wizards and they could speak into any non-private room and listen to conversations in any non-private room, move users from one room to another, and speak directly to users even if they were set to private. The rules were simple, like the interface, no fighting, no hate and no bullying.įor the Interface, everything was text based, you could chat in the room, chat directly to any person who was not set to private, post a short message on a room board, and leave a short message for users who may not be logged in, or even if they were logged in. Kind of a fantasy setting with several open public areas and a few rooms that could be made private and a jail to remove users that broke the rules. I named the talker "The Keep" mainly as a reference to the atmosphere being a small castle. I brought on a small group of five people from across various time zones to be administrators, and soon had a few hundred people using this system. And adding encryption to the authentication system. But I could restrict who could view logins, and create a rudimentary authorization system, allowing only certain users to view content. Some problems were the reliance on telnet to connect, similar to IRC and the inherent concurrent user login restrictions. There was a simplistic backdoor which I removed and added some missing memory management.
I tried running MUD code, but that was a memory hog and did not fix privacy concerns, I looked at other code bases and settled on a solution similar to Lintilla which was NUT (Neil's Unix Talker) code as a base. I did not start out to make an LGBT server, this was more of a coding and deployment exercise. However, I did not realize until much later that in 1993 there was no exclusively LGBT Internet chat site. Among some other alternatives was Lintilla an adult chat site, which had one gay chat server on port 5002. For example: IRC - Internet Relay Chat was huge, there were some MUDs - MultiUser Dungeons (MOOs) and other off shoots, but they had their detractors, like IRC could display every person's location, and the users were not exclusively LGBT, MUDs had similar issues including a more difficult user interface and they were designed for game play which intrinsically spread users over their virtual landscape and made conversation and community more difficult. Let me say that there were many places on the old pre-forprofit Internet where people could meet to chat who were gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender.