About the Esoteric Chat forum

Esoteric Chat is a web-forum which centers around topics that are “typically not understood by the majority of people,” hence the name esoteric. However, it is also a website with a rich and detailed history; and, in addition to this, it has been the subject of sharp criticism on behalf of its members originating from various different communities. Over time, the forum began to flourish into a community of its own, with its own conventions and sense of humor.

I first discovered the esoTalk software as an alternative to phpBB after spending a couple of hours researching about forum softwares and what makes them different from each other. (On the esoBB page I provide a brief history of esoTalk and my interacton with the community.) For many years, I hosted my own private esoTalk forum where I tinkered with the software on a rather superficial level. Long after the software had been completely rewritten into the Gamma version, and was later succeeded by Flarum, I decided to revisit esoTalk beta and came to the realization that it would be much more suitable for a “topicless” forum. Furthermore, there are many aspects of the Beta that are functionally superior to its sucessors. The search engine, using tags and gambits, does a good job of walking the middle line between a search function that can satisfy both novice and advanced users.

At this point in reckoning, I was going through my second year of high school. The first incarnation of Esoteric Chat was brought online on 22 February 2018; at this point it was just known as “esoTalk.” (Very creative name, I know!) Not long after, the project was realized by some members of the Flarum community, thus prompting Toby to reach out to me. He gave me permission to use the old esoTalk logo and continue building upon the Beta codebase in exchange for changing the name of the forum so as not to confuse people. Many of these events were purely incidental in nature, and I had never considered that anybody outside of my little high school friend group would have noticed the website. Over the course of my high school years, working on the forum served as a vehicle whereby I learned the rudimentary basics of server-side scripting. Looking back, my work was crucial in giving me the experience to advance further beyond that point.

The first “real” users to sign up (those who weren’t referred to the forum in person by me) were sourced from Total Freedom and other Minecraft servers like Aedificium. During the year 2021, lots of users were referred to the forum by a 4chan advertisement; this was originally the idea of Longo, a moderator on the site and lifelong friend, which was rather successful in garnering enough attention to produce a sprawling online community. The frequency of new posts and conversations was substantially altered by the presence of a greater number of users; and this, together with the creation of multiple “centipedes,” had an effect on the subject matter of said conversations whereby the focus definitely shifted from passing around meaningless inside jokes more towards esoteric subjects. As such, the “eso” in esoTalk had developed a second meaning. (By this point, it was being regarded as an an abbreviation for “esoteric.”) And so, I eventually decided to rename the website to Esoteric Chat.

Roughly one year after the forum hit popularity, I was forced to make the decision to remove old accounts in order to move forward with the security improvements I had been making to the esoBB forum software. At this point, the forum had gone from running what was basically just esoTalk beta to what is now known as esoBB. Since then I have become more concerned with refining the forum software rather than catering to the community of the forum itself. There still exists an archive of the old forum and all its contents.