FAR OUT in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Starship Titanic website sat a specious message board with posts by the senior crew of the fictional ship. The site was launched in 1997 to support Douglas Adams's CD-ROM game of the same name, offering enhancements, misleading ideas, technical support and, of course, nonsense. The board provided clues and additional amusement to players and potential players of the game.

This is not its story.

Rather, it is the story of the Employee Forum, a thriving hidden society buried deep within the site, where lost travellers wandering down several dead ends inadvertently ended up. And they did not even need to pass a door labeled "Beware of the Leopard" leading to a disused lavatory. But the site's developers ensured the ride was not wholly smooth. As Yoz Grahame recently explained at MetaFilter, in "The Post That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong":

...one day, folks got a mail from the intranet admin, "Chris Stevedave", giving folks the link to the intranet and the current password, which was hurriedly followed by a second mail apologising for the accidental mail leakage and urging customers not to click the link, then a third email noting that Chris Stevedave had been demoted to Bilge Emptier Third-Class.

(Stress and nervous tension are now serious social-networking problems in all parts of the internet. In order not to exacerbate the condition, Babbage will disclose in advance that the Employee Forum is alive and well.)

Starship Titanic was an epic video game based on a story by Douglas Adams that he was also supposed to turn into a book, but—as is invariably the case with every story involving Mr Adams, deadlines, promises to keep said deadlines, promises following failure to keep promises to keep said deadlines, and so on—he did not. Monty Python's Terry Jones, a collaborator, pulled what is widely regarded as one of the hardest three weeks' work in history to complete the book in time. Mr Adams focused his efforts on the CD-ROM game, and, to a vastly lesser extent, the accompanying website. Commendably, the game's programmers wound up only a lot behind schedule. (The well-loved Mr Adams, who died in 2001, was also incapable of writing an introduction to his own site, either prior to its launch or after, until his sudden demise.)

Mr Grahame told Babbage that as a near afterthought he pounded out some programming code to allow forum posts by those who navigated their way through six screens of resistance. He and his colleagues at the Digital Village ignored that area, focusing instead on other, more critical elements of the site. Mr Grahame, who now works for Linden Lab on its Second Life virtual world, stumbled on the employee forum six months later only to discover thousands of posts.

The programming crew had accidentally created a community of the sort that crop up all over the internet. Most online discussions take place in discussion forums designed to allow people to create an identity and interact in threaded, chronological conversations. But the hidden recesses of the web provide enough soil to root entire worlds, too. Wherever one person may post words which more than one other may read and respond to, a world is born.

Babbage's colleague, for instance, found a blog entry on his site had accidentally turned into a support forum for Sonic Drive-In, a fast-food chain. An innocuous post in June 2004 was seized upon by those unhappy with the restaurants' service, and then by managers of the firm. Over six years and dozens of comments later, the thread continues to grow. If you have used the web for any length of time, you have probably seen this again and again: reviews on an Amazon product page metamorphose into a long-running digression; a guest-book page forgotten by its creator, possibly not longer linked on the main site, where people reveal dark secrets to strangers. Muses Mr Grahame:

When TDV [The Digital Village] died I moved the forum to my own hosting; every so often one of the players will poke me because something's broken, and I'll eventually fix it and they can carry on with their adventures. It's been thirteen years of hosting an accidental community. It's somewhat like ignoring the vegetable drawer of your fridge for a year, then opening it to find a bunch of very grateful sentient tomatoes busily working on their third opera.

Intriguingly, when he added a feature that allowed rudimentary type styling, he found that it was rarely used, if at all, as those building the narrative stuck to what they knew and loved, ie, plain text. Clay Shirky, one of the web's wise men, described the phenomenon in 2002:

One surprise is that if a community forms on a site you host, they may well treat you, the owner of the site, as an external perturbation. Another surprise is that they will treat growth as a perturbation as well, and they will spontaneously erect barriers to that growth if they feel threatened by it. They will flame and troll and otherwise make it difficult for potential new members to join, and they will invent in-jokes and jargon that makes the conversation unintelligible to outsiders, as a way of raising the bar for membership.

They are also, predictably, protective. Mr Grahame forwarded Babbage an email he received in 1997 from one of the forum's contributors after it was announced that the blog was about to be scrapped. It read, "while the producers and programmers work to find a way for us to play with their creations, we are busy building our own." The upshot? Mr Grahame helped to move the forum to where it resides these days, largely quiet, though it did stir from its slumber when a journalist came calling. Two complimentary nuclear-warhead tipped missiles were not launched. Rather, Babbage was sucked into the story, where he shall, in all improbability, remain.