The Steampunk Forum at Brass Goggles

[von Corax]

The Steampunk Forum at Brass Goggles is the Internet's oldest resource dedicated to the Steampunk community, and has been described as "the politest corner of the World Wide Web."

Brass Goggles was begun in February 2007 by Tinkergirl as a blog with an attached forum running on SMF 1.x. Since then the Blog has fallen by the wayside, and the Forum at one point was in the top 100 for traffic. It currently has over 28,000 registered members and over 848,000 posts.

Following a recent change of ownership and domain (the forum was previously at http://brassgoggles.co.uk), we have upgraded from SMF 1.something to 2.0.19 to (currently) 2.1.4.

Mods installed:

• Stop Forum Spam v.1.4 (Thank you, @SleePy! This mod is brilliant!)
• Yet Another Spoiler Mod v.1.2
• Simple Audio Video Embedder v.7.0.3
• Country Flags v.3.0

Themes installed:

• Brown Shades 2.1.4 (forum default)
• Burnt 1.0

In the past we also had a wiki at editthis.info, which uses the MediaWiki software; I have installed MediaWiki on my own host and am looking at integrating the wiki with the forum.

Steampunk began as a literary genre in the 1980s, but has since grown into an æsthetic and cultural movement which encompasses retro-futurist writing, role-play, cosplay, crafting and making, cuisine, social activities and even ethics and philosophy. Steampunks run the gamut from teens and preteens through seniors, from all walks of life, all political leanings and all socioeconomic means. The common characteristics are an expectation of mutual respect, a sense of whimsy and an appreciation for a nice, civilized cup of tea.

Politeness and civility are paramount at Brass Goggles. We prohibit such divisive topics as partisan politics, religious dogma and modern non-fantasy firearms (gun control and all that, you know,) although we do treat our members as intelligent adults and may look the other way if, say, a discussion of political or religious history seems to be remaining civil. As a result of this policy, flamewars simply do not occur; I have personally observed incipient flamewars self-extinguish as the participants took the time to explain their positions.

Visit The Steampunk Wiki at Brass Goggles for more information on what exactly (well, generally) the term "Steampunk" means.

[Diego Andrés]

Awesome, thanks for sharing.
Always interesting to read anything steampunk related, great forum and content.