Outpost Gallifrey
Encyclopedia
Outpost Gallifrey was a fan website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

 for the British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 science fiction television
Science fiction on television
Science fiction first appeared on a television program during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Special effects and other production techniques allow creators to present a living visual image of an imaginary world not limited by the constraints of reality; this makes television an excellent medium...

 series Doctor Who
Doctor Who
Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor who explores the universe in a sentient time machine called the TARDIS that flies through time and space, whose exterior...

. It was active as a complete fan site from 1995 until 2007, then existing solely as a portal to the still-active parts of the site, including its news page and forums
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...

 (rebranded as The Doctor Who News Page and The Doctor Who Forum, but still part of the original site architecture) until July 31, 2009.

Main site

Launched on December 11, 1995, the site was created and administered by Shaun Lyon. The site was based in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, and was primarily created to promote the annual Los Angeles Doctor Who convention
Science fiction convention
Science fiction conventions are gatherings of fans of various forms of speculative fiction including science fiction and fantasy. Historically, science fiction conventions had focused primarily on literature, but the purview of many extends to such other avenues of expression as movies and...

 Gallifrey One
Gallifrey One
Gallifrey One is an annual North American science fiction convention focusing primarily on the British television series Doctor Who and its spin-offs, Torchwood, K-9 and The Sarah Jane Adventures, with an additional emphasis on British and American science fiction television media, held each...

.

In January 2005, SciFi.com named Outpost Gallifrey its "Sci-Fi Site of the Week", noting its comprehensive coverage of all things Doctor Who. In March 2006, the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

referred to Outpost Gallifrey as "the premier Doctor Who website" in America. In November 2006, an interviewer for bbc.co.uk
Bbc.co.uk
BBC Online is the brand name and home for the BBC's UK online service. It is a large network of websites including such high profile sites as BBC News and Sport, the on-demand video and radio services co-branded BBC iPlayer, the pre-school site Cbeebies, and learning services such as Bitesize...

 recommended Outpost Gallifrey as a "terrific fan site", along with the BBC's official Doctor Who website. Its front page claimed that the website received over 25,000 readers every day, rising to up to 50,000 at times of peak interest in the show such as a series premiere or finale.

The site had numerous sections such as an episode guide (giving cast and crew details and story outlines), feature articles and a reviews section. Reader and member submissions were accepted by Lyon.

On October 9, 2006, Lyon announced that he would no longer be updating the news pages due to the fact that his "heart was no longer in [the constant news collection and editing] anymore." The initial plan was that most of the website would be archived, with only the forum and pages related to the annual Gallifrey One convention continuing to be updated regularly. However, on November 2, 2006, Lyon announced that the site's news page would be returning in a new form, with Lyon as editor-in-chief and a committee of reporters from the US, UK and beyond. The news page was relaunched on 1 December, along with the newly-incorporated Web Guide to Doctor Who, a manually maintained listing of Doctor Who websites. Previously this web guide had been a separate site, edited by Paul Harman over ten years.

On January 21, 2007, the website became affiliated with the popular Doctor Who podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...

 Doctor Who: Podshock
Doctor Who: Podshock
Doctor Who: Podshock is a weekly podcast about the British science fiction television series Doctor Who...

.

On August 27, 2007, Lyon announced that the majority of the site would no longer be updated; its most active parts would split into four separate websites, with the rest of the site to be archived. Specifically, the Outpost Gallifrey News Page was relaunched as the Doctor Who News Page (at www.doctorwhonews.com); the Outpost Gallifrey forum became the Doctor Who Forum (at www.doctorwhoforum.com); the address www.gallifreyone.com was retained for the Gallifrey One convention in Los Angeles; and the Web Guide to Doctor Who continued at www.doctorwhowebguide.com. However, it was not until December 1, 2007 that those changes came about, when the front page became a single links page to the various new sites, and Outpost Gallifrey was formally closed as a one-stop site. , the component sites of the former Outpost Gallifrey were still referred to by the site's old name.

On June 2, 2009, Lyon announced that the site, including the news page and forum, would close completely on July 31, 2009, save as the portal for the Gallifrey One convention. The closure was noted by Charlie Jane Anders
Charlie Anders
Charlie Jane Anders is an American transgender fiction author and commentator.She has written several books and is the publisher of other magazine, the "magazine of pop culture and politics for the new outcasts", she was winner of a 2005 Lambda Literary Award and a 2009 Emperor Norton Award...

 of io9
Io9
io9 is a blog launched in 2008 by Gawker Media. The blog focuses on the subjects of science fiction, futurism, and advancements in the fields of science and technology....

, who described Outpost Gallifrey as "the best Doctor Who fansite".

Discussion forum

, the site's discussion forum had over 40,000 registered members, of whom over 15,000 were considered "active". (During the UK broadcasts of the 2008 series
Doctor Who (series 4)
The fourth series of British science fiction television series Doctor Who began on 25 December 2007 with the Christmas special "Voyage of the Damned". Following the special, a regular series of thirteen episodes aired, starting with "Partners in Crime" on 5 April 2008 and ending with "Journey's End"...

 of Doctor Who, there were over 31,000 active members.) . The forum was actively moderated. The forum had close contacts with the production team and writers associated with the series, several of whom had been known to post on the forums. In April 2005, when the news of Christopher Eccleston
Christopher Eccleston
Christopher Eccleston is an English stage, film and television actor. His films include Let Him Have It, Shallow Grave, Elizabeth, 28 Days Later, Gone in 60 Seconds, The Others, and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra...

's departure from Doctor Who broke, discussion on the forum became so heated that Lyon shut the section down for two days; the closure was reported in The Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror is a British national daily tabloid newspaper which was founded in 1903. Twice in its history, from 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the title on its masthead was changed to read simply The Mirror, which is how the paper is often referred to in popular parlance. It had an...

. The British news media regularly used the site to garner examples of fan reactions to Doctor Who.

Doctor Who lead actor David Tennant
David Tennant
David Tennant is a Scottish actor. In addition to his work in theatre, including a widely praised Hamlet, Tennant is best known for his role as the tenth incarnation of the Doctor in Doctor Who, along with the title role in the 2005 TV serial Casanova and as Barty Crouch, Jr...

 admitted in a 2005 interview with Doctor Who Magazine
Doctor Who Magazine
Doctor Who Magazine is a magazine devoted to the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who...

that he had visited the Outpost Gallifrey forum shortly after his casting had been announced, to gauge fan reaction. "Well, when it was announced, I admit, I did go on Outpost Gallifrey to have a quick look, because I just couldn't help myself, and everyone was encouraging me to go on and see what the fans were saying about me," he told the magazine.

Gareth Roberts
Gareth Roberts (writer)
Gareth John Pritchard Roberts is a British television screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work related to the science-fiction television series Doctor Who...

, one of the writers of Doctor Who, complimented the persistence of fans on the website's forum who were able to track down the locations where the series was being shot. "These people should be working for MI5
MI5
The Security Service, commonly known as MI5 , is the United Kingdom's internal counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its core intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service focused on foreign threats, Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence...

, they're wasted on Outpost Gallifrey," Roberts said in a December 2006 interview with Doctor Who Magazine. "To be able to comb that amount of media and make contacts and find this stuff out... they should be hunting Al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda is a global broad-based militant Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden sometime between August 1988 and late 1989. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a radical Sunni Muslim movement calling for global Jihad...

, not stalking Nick Briggs
Nicholas Briggs
Nicholas Briggs is a British actor and writer, predominantly associated with the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who and its various spin-offs, particularly as the voice of the Daleks. Briggs sometimes uses the pseudonym Arthur Wallis...

 in a van in the middle of nowhere."

The fan discussions in the forum were sometimes critical of aspects of Doctor Who production. In a 2007 email recorded in the behind-the-scenes book Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale, executive producer and lead writer Russell T Davies wrote, "I've been browsing Outpost Gallifrey to read how crap I am." Davies also mentioned that writer Helen Raynor
Helen Raynor
Helen Raynor is a British television and theatre writer and script editor. From 2004 until 2007 she was one of the script editors of the revived version of the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who, working on its first three series...

 and composer Murray Gold
Murray Gold
Murray Gold is an English composer for stage, film, and television and a dramatist for both theatre and radio.-Television:Gold has been nominated for a BAFTA four times in the category Best Original Television Music, for Vanity Fair , Queer as Folk , Casanova and Doctor Who...

 had visited the site to see fan reactions to their work, and had experienced a "loss of faith" in their own abilities afterwards.

The forum's popularity and reputation for debate over Doctor Who-related matters were even acknowledged in the programme itself. In 2004, when the first photographs of the new series' TARDIS prop were revealed, there was a vigorous discussion of the prop's historical accuracy on the Outpost Gallifrey Doctor Who discussion forum, an example being that the prop's windows were too big compared to real-life police boxes. In the episode "Blink
Blink (Doctor Who)
"Blink" is the 10th episode of the third series of the new production of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was first broadcast on 9 June 2007, and is the only episode in the 2007 series written by Steven Moffat; the episode is based on a previous short story written by...

" one character tells another that the TARDIS is not a real police box
Police box
A police box is a British telephone kiosk or callbox located in a public place for the use of members of the police, or for members of the public to contact the police...

 and mentions that the windows are the wrong size as evidence. Episode writer Steven Moffat
Steven Moffat
Steven Moffat is a Scottish television writer and producer.Moffat's first television work was the teen drama series Press Gang. His first sitcom, Joking Apart, was inspired by the breakdown of his first marriage; conversely, his later sitcom Coupling was based upon the development of his...

 confirmed in 2007 that this line was an in-joke
In-joke
An in-joke, also known as an inside joke or in joke, is a joke whose humour is clear only to people who are in a particular social group, occupation, or other community of common understanding...

 aimed at the Outpost Gallifrey forum.

In early 2008, the Outpost Gallifrey Forum was rebranded as "The Doctor Who Forum". The British press continued to use the forum as a gauge of Doctor Who fan opinion. The forum was closed along with the rest of the site on July 31, 2009,; its successor, Gallifrey Base
Gallifrey Base
Gallifrey Base is an Internet forum dedicated to discussion of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It has been described as "one of the largest [Doctor Who] fan forums" and "the biggest Who fansite". , the site had 32,062 members....

 is run by most of the Forum's support staff. Gallifrey Base officially opened on June 13, 2009.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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