BYU 100 Hour Board
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The '100 Hour Board' (or simply the Board) is a question and answer forum at the campus of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. While its primary readership is comprised of BYU students, the 100 Hour Board also services alumni, faculty and staff, prospective students, family members of students, and any other interested parties. Participants can submit questions of any sort and receive an answer 100 hours later. Topics range from science to relationships to LDS Church doctrine to current events. The 100 Hour Board is staffed by volunteer 31 student writers and editors, according to the Fall 2006 issue of the BYU alumni magazine. The Board is sponsored by BYU NewsNet.
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[edit] History
The 100 Hour Board (often simply called "the Board") was first conceived sometime around 1995 as a student forum through which the Student Advisory Council (SAC) could communicate with the student body. The Board initially existed simply as a physical entity in the now-removed step-down lounge of the Ernest L. Wilkinson Student Center. Students could write questions on slips of paper and place them in a box, and within 100 hours SAC would post an answer on a cork board. In this incarnation, the 100 Hour Board was seldom used, and when the Student Center was renovated, the Board was taken down and kept in storage for the next two years.
In late 1998 a student named Andy Pearson revived the 100 Hour Board. It was placed in a new location in the basement of the Student Center. This is when the 100 Hour Board began to develop the traits that led to its popularity. First, Pearson advertised and recruited other students to form a small staff of writers to answer questions. These dedicated writers researched and wrote the answers to the questions. Among the first round of writers was Matt Astle, who would later succeed Pearson as editor. Second, one of the volunteer writers, Karen Stay, created the first 100 Hour Board Web site. The third and most important change, however, occurred in the questions themselves. Prior to this point, students primarily asked questions about university and student government issues and signed their real names. However, during the 1998-1999 school year some students began asking funny and non-BYU-related questions and signing pen names. In response, the 100 Hour Board writers gave creative and often witty answers that soon became popular. Soon, most of the question did not relate to BYU or student government. As the writers used consistent pseudonyms, many loyal readers identified with these humorous personalities.
Since 1999 the 100 Hour Board has become an on-line entity, abandoning its physical poster board version in 2005. The Web site has become more detailed and complex along with the general development of the Internet. The Board has also changed editors and sponsoring bodies several times. However, the basic concepts and traditions of the 100 Hour Board have remained the same.
[edit] Controversies
[edit] Student Advisory Council
From time to time during its history, the 100 Hour Board clashed with the interests of its sponsoring bodies. By 1999 the Board had distanced itself from the Student Advisory Council, essentially becoming its own self-contained entity. In July of 2000, SAC unilaterally decided to remove the 100 Hour Board. The writers and readers of the Board mounted a campaign to restore the Board. The movement was ultimately successful when the student body president decided to reinstate the Board under the auspices of BYUSA Public Relations.
[edit] BYUSA Public Relations
The 100 Hour Board continued to operate mostly under the radar until 2002, when the administration of BYUSA began to take issue with some of the content on the Board. They had received a complaint about an answer regarding a faculty member and wanted to moderate all content on the Board. The Board editor complied for some time, but the administration officials soon lost interest. However, because the Board had a policy of answering almost every question and because the answers were often sarcastic, there was a continual tension between the 100 Hour Board and BYUSA.
The Board continued to operate independently until 2004, when student officers at BYUSA Public Relations expressed interest in working more closely with the 100 Hour Board. At the time, this was viewed by both sides as a potentially positive development. The Board would get new Web space and publicity while Public Relations would get a chance to work with a forum with significant readership on campus. However, this new arrangement quickly devolved into a crisis. Over the Christmas 2004 holiday break, the President of BYU received an email complaint about an answer on the Board that used mildly crude language. Around the same time, a 100 Hour Board writer posted a controversial response regarding homosexuality without approval from the editors. When BYUSA administrators investigated the initial complaint, they discovered the unapproved answer and other content to which they objected. In a panic, BYUSA had a network administrator take down the whole site.
The 100 Hour Board Web site was down for most of the month of January 2005 while 100 Hour Board editors and writers engaged in a series of talks with BYUSA officials. The editors offered to provide administrators complete transparency and censorship accesses, but the administrators were still reluctant to allow the Board to continue. After several meetings, a tentative agreement was reached in which the Board could reopen and a BYUSA administrator would okay every answer before it posted. During this brief period of operation, the Board editors reluctantly engaged in widespread censorship for the first time in the Board's history. However, the administrators vastly underestimated the volume of questions and answers, and conflicts immediately resurfaced regarding content and language usage. Editors continued talks with BYUSA in an attempt to develop concrete standards under which the Board could operate, but the officials refused to create standards to which they would be bound. Sensing the futility of this process, 100 Hour Board editors and writers began to look for another sponsoring organization. Eventually, the Board got a sponsorship offer by the BYU Linguistics Society. BYUSA still claimed ownership of the physical board in the basement of the Student Center, so the Board abandoned its original format.
[edit] BYU Linguistics Society
The 100 Hour Board operated under the Linguistics Society much as it had in years past. It needed no resources other than Web space. In return, the Linguistics Society used the vast body of text in the archives and current posts to conduct language experiments. However, the two organizations shared few organizational goals, and some continued tensions existed stemming from some of the 100 Hour Board content.
[edit] BYU NewsNet
In 2006, the 100 Hour Board began talks with BYU NewsNet, the university's news organization. The mission and goals of these two organizations were more in harmony, so the 100 Hour Board moved again to its present home. The Daily Universe, the BYU student newspaper, also began a regular column with select questions and answers from the 100 Hour Board.
[edit] Questions
To read the 100 Hour Board, a person must have only access to the internet. However, to ask a question, one must become a registered reader and log in. Although a user's real name and email address are required to ask a question, all answers are posted as aliases and real names are not accessible to the readership. All writers of the Board and the vast majority of readers post their questions with aliases, which has led to a unique culture surrounding the Board (see below). Finally, before asking a question, readers are encouraged to search the archives to see if it has already been asked.
The number of questions that are posted varies considerably, depending on the availability of the writers to respond to readers' questions, the number of questions received, and even the day of the week. A typical day will find forty questions being posted, although as few as four have gone up, and as many as 100. More questions are posted during the school year than during the summer, and no questions are ever posted on Sundays.
Over the years, readers have asked over 30,000 questions, and all of them from July 1999 to the present are available at the archives.[1] Please note, however, that the questions are not numbered in order.
Because of the nature of its reading population (consisting mostly of BYU students), there are a large proportion of questions dealing with the university itself, LDS church doctrine and policy, and dating relationships. However, questions touch upon all areas of interest, including the arts, science, current events and politics, and other topics which are of general interest.
The editors of the Board reserve the right to not answer a question. Usually questions of a controversial or vulgar nature fall into this category, and the asker sometimes receives a message through the web site explaining why the question will not be answered by the writers. It is also Board policy to not answer the following types of questions:
- Questions that can be answered with a quick glance at the phone book.
- Price checks (i.e., how much does such-and-such cost?)
- Customer service or technical support inquiries
- Counting questions (see below)
[edit] Noteworthy Questions
[edit] Question #2366[2]
This question led to the current policy of not permitting counting questions. On January 12, 2004, the Board reported that there were 40,413 stairs at the time on BYU campus. The response took about four times as long as the typical 100 hours and includes a running total of how many stairs are in and around each building.
[edit] Question #2725[3]
Another response from January 2004. Here the reader, "Monday," asked what he or she could do with a pound of powdered sugar. Responses range from the useful (waffle party) to the absurd ("Eat it. All of it. Raw. Right now.") to the illegal ("Mail a little bit to every senator you know"). The responses to this question are a quintessential example of the tongue-in-cheek nature of many Board posts.
[edit] Questions #21534[4] and #31744[5] and Board Culture
As writers answer more and more questions, many of them start to obtain followings among their anonymous readers. However, due to the anonymous nature of both the writers and readers, most fans have no idea what their favorite writer(s) look like, despite following what they can find out about their lives religiously.
This situation was exploited humorously by one reader in question #21534 when he or she asked two writers if they were dating. The response (which is as of March 2007 the favorite response among all registered readers), includes four pictures of the two writers together... all with paper bags over their heads. A similarly humorous picture was posted for question #31744 on December 23, 2006 when ten writers acted out the nativity scene, again, with bags over their heads.
