The Weather Channel fandom

The Weather Channel fandom is an international, informal community of fans of the American digital cable and satellite television network The Weather Channel. This community began to come into existence with the advent of the Internet and the rise of forum websites, such as the TWC Classics community forums, now defunct, and the TWC Today and Taiganet community forums. The fandom continues to be a mainly online phenomenon, most recently expanding into instant messaging platforms such as Discord.

Background and characteristics

The Weather Channel's fan community is a multigenerational and diverse group, encompassing fans from all walks of life. The fandom has begun to skew towards younger demographics over the years, however, as some veteran members of the community have either retired from producing content or have left the fandom altogether. While an overlap exists between The Weather Channel's fan community and fans of meteorology in general, some fans of the network are exclusively interested in the network's local forecast technology (Weather Star computers), news presentation, music, graphic design, or other factors. Some members of the vaporwave aesthetic community are also members of The Weather Channel's fan community due to the network's previous musical and graphical aesthetics. Some of these members have even created vaporwave remixes based on the network's music tracks. While The Weather Channel is currently an exclusively American television network, it did in the past reach international audiences (such as in Latin America), and as such, it has managed to gain a small international following.

Over the years, the community's gathering spaces have evolved with the rise of different methods of online communication. In the 1990s through the 2010s, the primary spaces associated with the fandom were traditional forums, the first of which were TWCFORUM and The Weather Channel Message Boards, established by The Weather Channel itself for community outreach. Stemming from these original forums arose a variety of fan-operated forums/content sites such as TWC Classics, TWC Today, and Taiganet, the latter two of which remain the largest of the remaining fan forums. The modern form of The Weather Channel's fandom has moved significantly to instant messaging services such as Telegram and Discord, with the fandom's increasingly younger audience preferring these platforms over traditional forums. Despite this, The Weather Channel attempted to build a new forum space, We Love Weather, in the mid-2010s, for general viewer outreach. In spite of the overall trend toward instant messaging, TWC Today and Taiganet continue to receive some level of activity, although the trend contributed in part to the decline of the We Love Weather forums.

History

The 1990s

In the 1980s and early 1990s, prior to the establishment of an online community for fans of The Weather Channel, any communication between fans is essentially undocumented, and it may be assumed that strong fans of the network were largely isolated from each other. In this early era, two fans of the network from differing regions of the United States coincidentally became pioneers creating some of the earliest known Weather Star simulator projects, simulated versions of The Weather Channel's computer-generated local forecast segments. Bill Goodwill, the eventual founder of the Taiganet forum, who was based in Maine, created a rudimentary version of a project that would later become the Weather Star 4000 Simulator as early as 1993. This version of his simulator ran on a PowerPoint-like program, HSC Interactive. Similarly, Charles Abel (later Charles Abel-Lear), based in Minnesota, utilized the program QBasic to compile early simulations of the Weather Star III in 1992 and the Weather Star 4000 in 1993, later transitioning these projects to MacroMedia Action in 1994 for overall improvement. These projects laid the groundwork for later simulation projects that defined the TWC fan spaces of the 2000s.

The first attempt by The Weather Channel to build connections with its viewers was in 1995, with the launch of a CompuServe forum called TWCFORUM, also known as "The Weather Channel Forum". This forum provided a space for the network's meteorologists and fellow weather fanatics to have conversations about weather topics. Additionally, users could talk among themselves, visit a forum library to learn about meteorological topics, view tips for weather safety, and view images of historical weather events. During this era, a member of the forum and TWC music enthusiast Matt Marron became known for compiling and documenting playlists of the network's music selections. In summer 1997, he established his own site for these endeavors, the first independent TWC fan website, originally named Matt's TWC Music Homepage (today TWC Classics). The following year, the site expanded to cover more aspects of The Weather Channel and even became a reseller for independent artists' music.

A screenshot of CompuServe TWCFORUM.

In spite of the existence of TWCFORUM, The Weather Channel launched another forum, The Weather Channel Message Boards (TWCMB), on its website weather.com in mid-to-late 1999. This new forum allowed for viewers to communicate with TWC-affiliated personalities utilizing a live chat feature, often related to specific topics and themes. TWCMB developed a culture of its own, with a group of established community members, including Marron, establishing their own social hangout niche, a thread named the Pot Belly Stove, a tradition that continued on later forums.

2000-2005

Bill Goodwill developed version one of his Weather Star 4000 Simulator, now coded based on mIRCscript, in fall 2001. Around May to September 2002, he founded Taiganet, an Internet forum he used to publicly release the simulator project at that time. Taiganet, while at the time a forum also dedicated to gaming and a server hosting service, developed a significant parallel TWC fan community to TWC's existing forums. Around the same time Taiganet was established in mid-to-late 2002, Matt Marron established forums for TWC Classics, with these also developing a thriving fan community. Development of the Weatherscan XL simulator, created by cc17926, began later in 2003, with early releases and progress documented on the TWC Classics forums. Charles Abel-Lear joined TWC Classics in 2004, helping to develop special events, designing recreations of Weather Star 4000 graphics, and rebranding the website. The TWC Classics forums were briefly closed beginning in mid-to-late 2004.

In early March 2005, fandom members Justin Matherne and Gary Tanner, Jr., established TWCforums, a forum dedicated to The Weather Channel at that time rather than the classic eras of the channel during the 1980s-90s. Only a day after the founding of this forum, Matt Marron reestablished the TWC Classics forums. Tanner, Jr., and Marron had a history of disagreement on The Weather Channel Message Boards. Despite a lack of definitive evidence for the reasoning for such close founding dates for the forum, archived posts on TWCforums suggest a likely possibility of a conflict on TWCMB leading to the establishment of these communities. This would align with user testimony that the boards in later years became plagued with controversies sometimes exacerbated by lack of administrator action. Regardless of specifics, the two communities split from TWCMB and became distinct in their own right. Marron migrated the Pot Belly Stove thread to his reestablished forum and managed to poach many members from TWCMB. In doing so, he would begin to expand the membership of his forum past that of the original iteration. In May 2005, Marron announced his intention to refocus TWC Classics on classic TWC material and migrate contemporary Weather Channel multimedia content to another site willing to take it. In spite of previous controversy, at that time, Matherne and Tanner, Jr., worked with Marron to transfer this array of content to a new companion site to TWCforums, TWC Today. Around this time, Matherne would abandon his forum and the new site, leaving Tanner, Jr. as the sole owner of both. In the wake of a poorly received attempt at a relaunch of his forum later that year and a brief return to the original forum, Tanner, Jr.'s forum eventually fizzled in activity over the next year.

Not long after YouTube was launched in 2005, it would attract fans of The Weather Channel, who set up channels on the website to cater to the growing online community presence. They would upload footage of the network, especially local forecast segments and footage of major events covered by the network. Some others, including Charles Abel-Lear, would go on to create channels largely devoted to simulated versions of the local forecast, including uploads of the Weatherscan XL and Weather Star 4000 simulators.

2005-2009

The year 2006 saw a variety of notable events occur in both official and fan-operated spaces. Following the successful rebound of the TWC Classics forums, The Weather Channel took notice, with its Weather Star development team working with the site's staff in March 2006 to recruit beta testers for HiRAD, a new data localization technology the network would use across its services, including its local forecast segments. Resulting from this effort was the establishment of an official TWC-operated technical support section of the TWC Classics forums in which users could report issues with the network's localization technology. On the other hand, over the previous few years, both TWCFORUM on CompuServe and TWCMB had begun to decline in quality, in part due to controversy and administrator inaction during these events. The Weather Channel would officially end its presence on CompServe in early 2006, with TWCFORUM transitioning to a general weather forum at that time. The Weather Channel Message Boards would close later in June 2007, with an administrator citing the forum not being "part of their plans" for TWC's official website as a reason for closure. While some members doubted this official explanation, the closure of these two official community outreach programs combined with the opening of an official help space on a fan forum signaled the end of a centralized fan outreach strategy and an overall shift to fan-directed community-building.

In the wake of the decrease in popularity of his previous forum, Justin Matherne's exit from co-ownership, and the closure of TWC's last official forum, Gary Tanner, Jr. relaunched both his forum and content site for TWC Today in June 2007 under a unified domain name. Unlike his previous attempt, and perhaps due in part to the then-recent closure of TWCMB, the relaunched TWC Today quickly amassed a large following, even attracting some of the network's on-camera meteorologists, other employees, and many of the network's featured musical artists. Over the next few years, he worked to add a variety of new contemporary Weather Channel multimedia items to his site. The popularity of this forum among fans extended also to The Weather Channel, much like TWC Classics. The Weather Star development team would establish a presence on the forum, operating what was effectively an officially sanctioned technical support contact section of the forum. On-camera meteorologists and other employees of the network would also make a home there, followed by many of the musical artists featured on the network. Other smaller communities, such as TWC Central and the WeatherSTAR Emulator Forum began to appear around the same time period as the fandom reached peak popularity at the intersection between The Weather Channel's higher relevance at the time and the continued growth of the Internet. Attempts at new simulator projects, creation of fan art pieces, and interest in the direction of the network all flourished during this time.

2010s-present

The mid-to-late 2010s saw the rise of online communities that contrasted with the traditional forum format associated with the fandom. The first major community of this kind was The Weather Chat, which begun on Kik in early 2015. The group soon moved to Telegram and continued to exist there until late 2017, when it transferred to Discord, which was still a new platform at the time. The group would transform into the wxTV Studios Discord server in 2018, which boasted over 200 members at its height. The transition to wxTV Studios coincided with Discord's explosion in popularity. After the end of The Weather Chat, other personalities would launch their own Discord servers to catch up with the platform's takeoff, such as Intelliguy, TWCKelby, and Triple C TWC, all of whose servers became affiliated with wxTV Studios. TWC Today would even go on to launch its own Discord server as a means for offering support for the Weatherscan XL simulator.

In April 2016, The Weather Channel, in the wake of the sale of its weather.com domain to IBM, launched a new website, We Love Weather, which was aimed toward its fan community and the weather community as a whole. Somewhat similar to the concept of TWCFORUM, the site featured news stories, quizzes, a photo gallery for users, videos, and a community forum. The forum was primarily a space for general weather conversation, with additional spaces set aside for weather questions, introductions by new users, and site suggestions. The forum was similar to TWCFORUM in other, more unfortunate ways, however. Like said forum, We Love Weather's forum became plagued by controversies, arguments, spam, and off-topic posts, with moderators often taking little to no action against it. The retirement of the forum, which fully went into effect by February of 2021, once again left TWCToday and Taiganet as the only dedicated forum sites for the community. The site as a whole went offline after just over two years of inactivity in February 2023.

The scope of many major fandom YouTube channels has focused from simulations of Weather Stars to their actual hardware, most exemplified by the monumental effort to reverse engineer the Weather Star 4000 in the late 2010s. This shift occurred primarily in the wake of the retirement of the analog Weather Star units, including the 4000, from official use in mid-2014, the domestic IntelliStar in late 2015, and the Weatherscan IntelliStar in late 2022.

Fan-made content

Over the years, The Weather Channel's fandom has published copious amounts of content online, of various kinds.

Simulators

Simulators of The Weather Channel's Weather Star technology, sometimes erroneously referred to as "emulators," have existed online since the early 2000s. The first major project was the Weatherscan XL simulator, still supported on the TWCToday forums. This was followed by Taiganet's Weather Star 4000 Simulator a few years later.

The late 2000s and early 2010s, a high point in the popularity of the fandom online, saw a large increase of interest in simulator projects. Multiple new forums and fan sites, many hosting planned or existing simulator projects, were established, including the WeatherSTAR Emulator Forum, WeatherSTAR 3000 Emulator Forums, TWC Central, and the IntelliStar Emulator website. Out of these, only some simulator projects truly came to fruition, which included multiple PowerPoint-based projects, some OpenOffice-based projects, and a coded simulator of the first iteration of the Weatherscan XL.

The terminology used to describe these programs has varied over the years. The common modern term is simulator, but the term emulator has been used in the past and is sometimes still used. The technical difference, according to software development testing service Sauce Labs, is that, in terms of what the program seeks to recreate, an emulator "attempts to mimic all of the hardware features of a production environment and software features," while a simulator does not attempt to emulate hardware. In the case of fandom-created simulator programs, these do not attempt to emulate the actual physical hardware of Weather Star units; thus, simulator is the correct term for such a program.

Mock-ups and other content

Fan art, mock-ups of on-air graphic elements, and other design projects have been associated with the fandom from an early point in its history. The largest collection of fan art pertaining to The Weather Channel is that found on the TWC Today forums, with a large forum category dedicated to this work that goes back to the forum's founding in the late 2000s. Much of this work is still accessible, but because of issues over time (image hosting platforms dying off, corruption to files, etc.), some of it has been lost.

The fandom has produced a staggering amount of content for YouTube related to the network, including fan-created content and archived recordings. Recordings of local forecast segments have always been particularly popular, but especially prior to around 2012-2015, a period when network changes drastically reduced the length, music choices, and graphical uniqueness of local forecasts across the country.

Milinoket Cabbl, a YouTube series by fandom personality Triple C TWC, began as a skit in a Weather Star XL video on that channel in 2016. Initially a way to poke fun at a cable company's mishandling of an XL, the skit soon spun off into its own full-length entity due to encouragement from the TWC community.

See also

• List of The Weather Channel fan websites and communities
• List of The Weather Channel fan YouTube channels