Some E.S. Posthumus fans may recall the official Yahoo! Groups website that was around during the mid-2000s. There isn’t much point looking for it now as it is long gone, but since its closure, it’s not difficult to notice the lack of message boards devoted to the musical talents of ESP.

The Yahoo! Groups message board was posted on frequently by many fans sharing their thoughts about the music and even on some occasions, fan remixes were made available for download (though unknown if the Vonlichtens approved of them). At its prime, several posts would be made each day, which is not bad considering two things. Firstly, people were still becoming familiar with the artist, and secondly, the website was a tad obscure to find. The moderator would drop by to make numerous announcements; the last being that the second album was to be a two disc release.

As time passed, the message board became victim to spam posts and signs of neglect. It’s only natural for visitors to stop checking when things turn dormant, but the large break between the release of Unearthed and Cartographer did little to alleviate the problem and it was obvious it made a few of the fans impatient.

While there could be more reasons behind the closure of the community website, the aforementioned points may have been contributing factors to its demise. Now to the present time.

A search will show that ESP has multiple profiles on Facebook and MySpace, however, none of them are official and are fan-made; a blessing or a curse in disguise. Either way, these unofficial profiles have attracted many users. Meanwhile, Luna Sans has stated that she created her MySpace profile, where she made frequent blog posts and has gained much attention.

Looking abroad, there are also many random forum threads to be found, often discovered by chance when you type a formula of words into a search engine. While it is great to see many people appreciating the music, you need to be a registered user of those forums in order to reply to the posts, and the fact is there are many of them out there.

Ultimately, it seems the Wikipedia article that begun nearly five years ago has been the main mechanism for casual chats, though talk is meant to be limited to the article itself. The problem I’ve had with that article (especially after the first couple of years) is there were too many moments where users would argue and edit the content back and forth; silly contests that provided nothing useful. As far as I am concerned, that page requires a major editing session.

At the end of the day, there is one actual message board known as the E.S. Posthumus Fans forum, which was created early last year. Although it is currently running off the free ProBoards message board system, I’m hoping that it will stick around for a while to encourage further growth.

The goal of this post was to provide my brief interpretation of the situation in regards to the fans of ESP. It can be hard for some to acknowledge that the Vonlichtens have been active for nearly ten years, though in that time, I feel there is still a sense of disorganisation. I am happy that so many people enjoy their music and are open about it, but I know we can improve, it just better not take another decade.

Thanks Mike