When Dubstep Forum opened its virtual doors in 2005, message boards, flyer packs, radio plugs and good old word-of-mouth did what social media does now. Ivan "Dubway" Kovacevic, an 18-year-old Croatian who had never been to the UK, set out to connect the scene.

"This is a music forum," he wrote on the site's FAQ. "Keep that in mind. This place was started to bring people together. Bring music lovers together. We like to think of this site as an experiment of positivity. Global bass culture. You wouldn't trash up your own neighborhood, so please take the negativity and strife elsewhere."

Over the following ten years, Dubstep Forum exceeded all expectations in bringing like-minded people together, even if keeping negativity off the site proved more difficult. What remains today is an unmatched archive of club culture and the dubstep community.

Since the turn of the millennium, dubstep's mutation from 2-step garage, grime, drum & bass and dub was being led by a small but passionate crew, revolving initially around East Croydon's Big Apple record store. By October of 2005, when Dubway started the forum, the bass-heavy vibrations had spread from South London, becoming a prominent underground sound across the UK and in some pockets abroad. The club nights FWD>> and DMZ had created a regular place to hear this music on a worthy soundsystem. The first anthem—Skream's "Midnight Request Line"—was released. Dubstep's transformation from a section on the shelves at Big Apple to a globally recognised genre was well underway.

The sound needed its own space online. Ammunition Promotions—Sarah "Soulja" Lockhart and Neil Joliffe's company, which housed FWD>>, Tempa Records and Rinse FM—had started a dubstep-focused webshop and message board called Dubplate.net. There were also the likes of Hyperdub and Blackdown's blogs or more varied forums like Dissensus and Dogs On Acid. When Dubplate.net mysteriously closed, Dubway saw a gap. Fuelled by new possibilities for user-generated content (early Web 2.0), he started a free forum to engage the following his blog had gathered by hosting mixes on Zagreb University's server. Paul Rose, AKA Scuba, encouraged some heads to join and a few days later everyone was on there. To name a few: Mala, Skream, Benga, Mary Anne Hobbs, Blackdown, Kode9, SGT. Pokes, Bok Bok, Joe Nice, Oneman, Ben UFO and dubstep's Brazilian torchbearer Bruno Belluomini.

Within three months, membership was at 1,000 and Dubstep Forum was a vital hub, supplementing pirate radio as the voice of the 140BPM community. It was the frontline for knowing the latest releases and dubs, to the extent that there was already a thread for the best tracks of 2006 by mid-January of that year. It was an events listing platform, a way to share knowledge and a place to chat breeze. All users had a signature space to leave their tagline or links to their music, and there were private messaging possibilities. Moderators like Seckle or Boomnoise even led a democratic system for implementing changes to the forum.

Cinematic
Mala DJing at the first ever DMZ 3rd Base Brixton, London, March 2005

Dubstep Forum arrived right on time. The beginning of 2006 was a pivotal moment in the genre's history. As announced by Distance on the forum in November of '05, Mary Anne Hobbs would present a dubstep showcase on her BBC-hosted Breezeblock radio show. The thread took off and, by the time Dubstep Warz aired, the anticipation was palpable (the show also happened to be just a few days after one of the first DMZ nights). Mary Anne Hobbs' intro line—"the scent of revolution is high in the air tonight"—brought one commenter to tears. That iconic night resulted in a lot of new users, partly due to Hobbs' "shout out to all the crew posting on Dubstep Forum right now."

Dubway and Plastician capitalised on the moment, encouraging members not to upload the audio but to listen via the Radio 1 website. By doing so, the BBC would see the play count and hopefully keep programming their sound. Later that January came the release of the Digital Mystikz classic, "Anti War Dub." A month later, forum user Deapoh started Barefiles, the first downloadable library of dubstep and grime mixes. From then on, Dubway says, Dubstep Forum had over 10,000 unique visitors every day for years.

Though it cannot be compared to the real life community that started this movement, the vibe during the early years of Dubstep Forum was something special. Ninjas—as posters referred to each other—made serious efforts to describe a night for those who couldn't be there, offered rides to parties or countless other kindnesses. In response to a thread mourning Loefah's many lost dubs, the man himself logged in and gave away "Just A Beat" for free. On the forum's first birthday, it gave a present instead of receiving one. DJ N-Type was tasked with recording a mix packed with forum newcomers' music, leading to widespread recognition for them all.

When Burial's album Untrue was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2008, The Sun's showbiz journalist Gordon Smart started a campaign to unmask the elusive artist. To protect one of their own, Dubstep Forum users sent Smart false leads claiming Burial was in fact Fatboy Slim or forum member Dubluke. Smart wrote a piece in The Sun with the bogus information, much to the forum's satisfaction. The tabloid witch-hunt prompted Burial to post a photo to his MySpace page and reveal his identity, but at least he did so on his own terms.

This collective mentality stretched to releasing music. In the site's first weeks, DJ Chef planned to sell Skream and Benga's beats via a digital-only label centred around Dubstep Forum. Although it never materialised, Chef's idea had a lot of support and suggested the possibility of a self-sufficient music community. A year later, a group of North American users went all the way and created a cooperative, vinyl-only label called Pressing Issues. On the thread created to plan the label, forum members including Ramadanman (now Pearson Sound) and Elgato touch on everything from pyramid schemes to communism. Users voted for which artists would be featured—the first release housed Reso's debut—and Pressing Issues released two well-received 12-inches.

You can search almost anything on Dubstep Forum and find some sort of interesting commentary, especially with the advantage of hindsight. It is divided into topics like general discussion, dubs for feedback, production tips, events and mixes. The Secret Ninja Hideout is for everything off-topic. With MC SGT. Pokes as its first moderator, the hideout was started as a private place for users to keep their trash-talk out of the other topics. Now public, it's at best hit-and-miss, at worst a toxic wasteland of insults.

Aside from the two off-topic discussions about what made you happy or angry today, the forum's most popular thread is an ode to DJ Youngsta with 14,528 replies. There are some fascinating exchanges on dubplate culture, the introduction of the smoking ban in clubs, the scene's best journalists, what dubstep can learn from drum & bass or if dubstep was actually invented by Muslimgauze in 1995. Joe Muggs wrote about the ethics of dubstep, Helix weighed in on the appropriation of vogue music, and there is that spat between Ben UFO and Zomby.

Dubstep Forum is also a musical and social time machine that ensures some memories and seminal moments are not forgotten. The real time commentary from the queue outside the cancelled Bloc Festival in London is a good read. There are stories of Skream and Toasty playing bird or cat noises over exclusives on their radio shows to stop people ripping the tunes. Recap the dispute between Barefiles and Ammunition over Deapoh archiving Rinse FM sets. Relive DMZ nights, Outlook Festival or Skream's 2015 classics set at XOYO through post-event debriefs. Take a FWD>> history lesson, browse photographer Georgina Cook's The Dubstep Years album or discover the most obscure samples.

Some of the comments are comedy gold to a certain audience. Users compiled their favourite quotes from SGT. Pokes, there's a thread discussing where to take US DJ Joe Nice for his first pie & mash and a story of Steevio almost kicking someone out of Freerotation festival for wheeling up one of Mala's records (little did Steevio know, it's a sign of respect). A group of users, led by James Blake on the laptop, filmed a big band performance of Rusko's "Cockney Thug."

To many, the forum's main attraction was the Production, Hardware and Technical topic, where the Dubstep Production Bible collected all the most informative threads. Ikonika and Rusko were among those posting their first demos and looking for feedback. Objekt did a Q&A, dishing out invaluable tips to those wanting to recreate "Cactus." Jason Goz, the engineer of Transition Studios, gave insight on mastering and cutting dubs.

"I get my **** mastered at Transition."
Dubplate Lathe at Transition Mastering Studios, London

For all its positives, the prevalence of microaggressions and abuse on Dubstep Forum is troubling. The negativity ranges from innocent quips—you might get told to "draw for the slippers" for suggesting highbrow electronica—to pointless flaming, divisive attitudes and violent threats. Ask for an MP3 rip of "Anti War Dub" and feel the wrath, or if you release only 300 copies of Loefah's long-awaited Midnight / Woman 12-inch—as Berceuse Heroique did in 2014—prepare for users to sign in after years away and get creative with their insults.

Over time, the tone shifted. The Secret Ninja Hideout went from a funny sidenote to the biggest topic. Tensions appeared between the original fans and those interested in the tearout sound that became labelled "brostep." Fewer artists were posting in the later years, the demographic became more geographically dispersed. More people wanted to take but had less to give. Dubway recruited more help to keep things on track, but the main moderator, Seckle, got pushback for trying to bring some order.

Despite their efforts of posting rules, weirdly auto-correcting the N word to "successful black man" and censoring some other expletives, it proved impossible to keep the 70,000 users in check. The racism is usually sparked by a politically-charged conversation in the Secret Ninja Hideout, but the sexism is in plain sight. The artist E.M.M.A told Mixmag that she used a male account name because of it. Vaccine, the first female artist to release on a dubstep label, dealt with some awful comments while also working as a moderator to help contain the spam. Some users in the later years appear completely unaware of the indispensable contributions that women originators like Sarah Lockhart, Mary Anne Hobbs, Georgina Cook, Vaccine, journalists Chantelle Fiddy, Melissa Bradshaw and Emma Warren, or Dubpressure promoter Letty had made to the scene.

"I see now that what happened to Dubstep Forum also happened to Facebook," Dubway explained to me over email. "They started with good intentions, that like-minded people will be able to communicate. Soon you realize that the thing you created is out of your control and has become something completely different to your initial intentions. As Kode9 once told me when we were driving to play at a venue in Zagreb, 'You created a monster!'"

Floating
Youngsta DJing at DMZ Allnighter 4 at 3rd Base Brixton, London, 2005.

Around 2010, some of dubstep's core artists moved on to different sounds and many original users stopped posting. Dubway and other admins made efforts to keep their member base engaged. They started a topic called House to cater for the slower spinoffs, they conducted reviews, interviews, sample pack competitions, site design updates and real-life events. Sarah Lockhart once proposed to merge Dubstep Forum with Ammunition, which Dubway welcomed, but it never happened. As the years rolled on, it became clear that the best days were over or, at least, it was not a forum about dubstep anymore, nor an "experiment of positivity." In May of 2015, Dubway locked the site. He opened DSF Community which still exists today as a more general space for electronic music conversation, but has only gathered 3,000 members since its predecessor closed.

Dubstep Forum had an undeniably huge impact on the scene. Aside from a short break in 2008, it was running solidly for a decade. The annual Dubstep Forum Awards poll was influential in who and what were getting read, booked or signed to labels. The forum connected disparate scenes; first London with the likes of Bristol, Leeds, São Paulo, Amsterdam and New York, and then further afield. It gave a platform to forum junkies in their bedrooms, the most active being Nowaysj, who posted over 23,000 times. It allowed dubstep enthusiasts to network, to become unsung heroes of the scene, to unleash their inner music critic or just to get some feedback on their new mix. After a lot of digging on the site, some how-did-they-find-that A&R moments of the last years make sense. The forum's influence even spreads as far as the England football team. Striker Jamie Vardy was credited for the phrase "chat shit get banged" following a 2011 Facebook post, but it was already commonplace on Dubstep Forum a year before, during the Seckle police era.

Skank at FWD>>, Hatcha at DMZ

There's another side to the story. Before Dubstep Forum existed, underground music (and the physical music market in particular) was already suffering from the internet's explosion. In Lauren Martin's Oral History Of Dubstep, Artwork explains that "[filesharing] was the death of Big Apple, frankly: you go from selling 2,000 records to 200 records, because who the fuck wants to buy a record when you can get it for free?"

By 2011, everything was accessible and the mystical allure was gone. Interaction on sites like Dubstep Forum had overtaken real world get-togethers. The community drifted apart, musically at least, bringing in other influences which were no longer anchored by the foundational reference points. Soon, Magnetic Man were in the charts, Loefah released bass music on Swamp81, Pinch was at 130 BPM, Kode9 played juke and post-dubstep was a thing. Depending on who you ask, dubstep either evolved towards commercial success, leaving just a few crews who continue the original vibe today, or it died. Either way, the internet played a big part.

What Dubstep Forum has left behind is unique. "After realizing that I cannot save Dubstep Forum," Dubway told me, "I decided to freeze it and preserve it as an archive document for future generations. There are a lot of high quality discussions for music culture historians and enthusiasts who want to know about their heroes and the origin of the sound. That is why I still pay for the servers."