It is not a forum. There are no accounts, no posting, no voting and no advertising, and it is not affiliated with DataLounge.
Why
I read DataLounge for years. When it closed, twenty-eight years of gay writing went with it: the gossip and the bitching, but also the arguments, the advice, and a great many people talking plainly about their own lives. Almost none of it exists anywhere else. It seemed worth keeping.
So this is here to be read. I hope it is some use to you.
Where this came from
Almost all of it comes from a complete capture of the live site taken on its last day and published on GitHub as a set of compressed database files. Every volume was checked against the checksums published with it, the threads and posts inside were counted, and a sample was compared line by line against captures made independently by the Wayback Machine, Common Crawl and Archive Team. They agree.
The rest, a few thousand threads, comes from those archives. They matter out of all proportion to their number, because the full capture could only contain what was still live on the last day, and DataLounge deleted as it went.
What is missing, and why
DataLounge expired old threads for its entire life. Because it issued one running number to every thread and every post, the gaps can be counted: 17.2% of everything ever posted to the site had already been deleted before it closed.
That deletion was not spread evenly. Across the most recent nine tenths of the site’s history, 96–99% of posts survived to the end. Across the oldest tenth, 0.1% did.
The oldest thing still standing on DataLounge when it closed was the thread posted as the September 11 attacks happened. Everything with a lower number, the site’s first six years, had been purged. This archive holds 61 threads from below that line, recovered only because the Wayback Machine happened to capture them between 1998 and 2001. They are the entire surviving record of DataLounge before September 2001.
How to read it
Reply numbers are DataLounge’s own, and are never renumbered. Thirty years of posts cite each other positionally, as in “R12 is right”, so a shifted number would silently point at the wrong post. Hovering an R-reference shows the post it points at, and what that post was itself replying to.
Where the source did not record a reply number it was reconstructed from post order. That method was tested against threads where DataLounge’s own numbering is independently known: it is exact for 99.2% of them, and where it is wrong it is out by one.
Timestamps are DataLounge’s own and exact to the minute for essentially the whole corpus. The handful that had to be estimated are shown with a ~.
Stars
DataLounge closed before anyone could agree on its best threads, and the archive should not be the one deciding. Stars are how readers settle it between them.
The star at the head of a row in any listing is for the thread as a whole. The star under a reply is for that reply alone. They are counted separately, because a thread worth reading and a single line worth quoting are not the same thing. The replies that collect the most appear on the front page, under the classics.
There are no accounts, so a star is kept against a one-way hash of your connection: enough to stop the same person starring the same post twice, and not enough to say who anybody is or what they read. Clearing your browser will not lose them, and nothing about them is shared or sold.
Takedowns
If you are named in a post and want it withdrawn, write to [email protected] with the thread number and the reply number.
Search engines index the pages describing this project. The threads are not indexed.
Feedback
Corrections, missing threads, and anything that looks wrong: the feedback page, or [email protected].
Support
Hosting costs a few dollars a month. There is no paywall and there will not be one. Put something in the tip jar if you would like to.