The Hive was an influential web forum discussing the chemistry of mind-altering compounds. The forum was started in 1997 by Strike and attracted a vibrant international community of more than 8,500 active users until it went offline by the end of 2004 at about half a million posts. Part of its success was its ambitious crew of moderators and its unique mix of topics: scientific discussions about advanced drug-related chemistry and pharmacology, the endlessly patient chaperoning and teaching of newbees in the Basic Chemistry & Techniques section, and politics, sex, fun stuff and other B.S. on The Couch.

The community developed its own culture and slang, some of which is still in use today, such as SWIM, bee, newbee, and honey (see Chem. Abbr., Unit Conv., & Hive Slang). The Hive even became nationally known in the US in 2001 after the NBC TV show Dateline aired an infamous special about Strike and a group of Hive members. However, by this time, he had long retired and the forum was run by Rhodium and a small group of devoted admins.

Demise

The forum was taken offline in 2004 when its hosting company was sold and the admins would no longer have direct physical access to the server. There were several attempts to bring the forum back online over the years, with plans on using elaborate network tunneling and proxy schemes to hide the server, but in the meantime the persons behind the board had moved on and were busy with new projects and careers.

Archive

This archive was launched on Erowid on September 9, 2015 and is a complete and original mirror of the forum from November 15, 2004, the day the server had to be taken offline due to hosting issues. As an archive, the board is read-only and it is not possible to log in. All private information has been removed, including passwords, email addresses, private messages, non-public forums, orphan file uploads and cached images. All automatically expired Couch posts have been restored and all posts from previous installations have been imported. The forum is running the original and fully functional software that has been updated for current environments. The board's content has been converted to UTF-8 so that Cyrillic texts now display correctly without any tweaks. Just browse the threads or use TFSE, the powerful and fast fucking search engine.

Timeline

08/01/1997 The Hive is founded by Strike as a message list on http://hive.lycaeum.org/message.html using WWWBoard software
04/10/1998 New forum software (Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB)). Strike steps back and hands the forum administration over to Rhodium.
01/20/1999 New The Couch board
01/18/2000 New Newbee Forum board
03/20/2000 Lilienthal hacks the board software and becomes lead developer [1][2]
03/30/2000 New Tryptamine Chemistry board [3]
04/13/2000 New The Server Room board
05/09/2000 New forum software (WWWThreads)
01/20/2001 UBB forum posts imported into new system (04/17/1998 - 06/03/2000)
06/05/2001 Forum goes offline due to Lycaeum hosting problems
07/10/2001 Forum opens under its own new address https://www.the-hive.ws/, running on a new server (draco) located in Europe
07/10/2001 Posts from old server imported (04/10/1998 - 05/07/2001)
07/10/2001 Welcome back! to the new forum, post by Rhodium
07/21/2001 More posts from old server imported (04/10/1998 - 11/06/1998)
10/31/2001 NBC Dateline "The X files" airs in the US
11/09/2001 New Law and Order board
05/17/2002 The Russian HyperLab forum becomes part of the Hive because of security concerns with their original hosting situation (see: A brief history of HyperLab in English)
04/30/2004 New server (apis, 1.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM, Debian 3.0r1)
04/10/2004 The forum ran a homepage contest after NBC Dateline announced to air a follow-up on the "X-Files": Special Dateline Episode, Discussing the Chemistry of Brain-frying Compounds, Welcome to this NBC sponsored web site, Access Blocked, NBC 404 Error, Watching TV.
11/14/2004 Post: Announcement: Server downtime expected
11/15/2004 Forum goes offline due to hosting issues
08/04/2015 The read-only static forum archive goes online at https://the-hive.archive.erowid.org
08/13/2015 Re-imported deleted posts (from cumulated regular backups, mostly autodeleted Couch posts)
09/04/2015 WWWBoard messages imported from Lycaeum backup dated 04/28/2001 (Post 541579 - Post 545805, 4,227 posts)
09/04/2015 UBB forum posts imported from Muriatic's html downloads (Post 545806 - Post 565730, 18,261 posts, Serious Chemistry, Stimulants, Methods Discourse, and Novel Discourse forums only)
09/04/2015 UBB forum posts re-imported from Lycaeum backup dated 04/28/2001 (Post 565731 - Post 565899, 123 new posts)
09/09/2015 Post links and markup updated, static links added to enable indexing by search engines (release 1.5)
10/04/2015 UBB forum posts imported from Tao's html backup (Post 565900 - Post 580666, 14,767 posts); removed duplicate threads (release 1.6)

Notable threads

Archive download

We will provide a ready-to-use download pack of html pages in the near future after completing the archive. Despite this, automated downloading and indexing of archive content using crawlers, spiders, and robots has been enabled. If the crawler identifies itself using its original referer (or if the referer contains the word "bot") it will be provided with static and unique links that prevent the otherwise inevitable multiple crawling of pages. It is essential to follow the archive's robots.txt file and <meta name="robots"> directives for this. (In a nutshell: do not crawl URLs containing ".pl?". Check the page footer of crawled pages for "Links: static, unique".) Please always keep in mind that the archive consists of more than half a million posts! You must run small initial tests and carefully check the results. You must also restrict the frequency and number of simultaneous requests. Otherwise we will block you or disable crawling altogether.

Statistics

Total posts and active usersa
Year Postsb Active usersc
1997 213 69
1998 23,985 1,531
1999 54,611 1,707
2000 101,499 2,499
2001 82,219 1,528
2002 127,498 1,798
2003 80,582 1,789
2004 58,599 1,379
totald 530,447 8,876
a Total posts: post count over all boards for release 1.6 (2015-10-04)
b Posts: total post count per year
c Active users: number of posting users per year
d total: post count over all years
Postsa
Board 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 totalb
Chemicals & Equipment 0 4,099 6,313 8,540 5,933 6,849 3,488 2,233 37,514
Chemistry Discourse 0 4,063 5,343 6,202 6,116 6,254 2,695 1,864 32,577
General Discourse 213 3,698 10,988 12,097 9,113 12,170 6,612 4,707 59,762
Law and Order 0 0 13 1 653 4,387 3,372 2,780 11,236
Methods Discourse 0 4,858 5,364 5,392 4,537 5,467 2,658 1,739 30,052
Newbee Forum 0 0 0 14,305 13,002 12,873 5,832 4,364 50,454
Novel Discourse 0 3,841 2,830 2,413 1,800 2,842 2,273 1,420 17,438
Russian HyperLab 0 0 0 0 0 1,904 2,512 1,562 5,987
Serious Chemistry 0 494 296 536 417 492 379 377 3,002
Stimulants 0 2,931 5,998 17,230 9,188 12,311 11,365 8,829 68,028
The Couch 0 1 17,460 33,398 28,386 53,948 34,429 26,261 194,467
The Server Room 0 0 6 26 1,969 6,188 3,250 1,626 13,087
Tryptamine Chemistry 0 0 0 1,359 1,105 1,813 1,717 837 6,843
Totalc 213 23,985 54,611 101,499 82,219 127,498 80,582 58,599 530,447
a Posts: total post count of release 1.6 (2015-10-04)
b total: cumulated over all years
c Total: cumulated over all boards
d Missing UBB board content for General Discourse from 1999

Links

Contact: the-hive@erowid.org Description last updated: 2015-09-17