Outpost Gallifrey - Discussion Forum

Discussion Forum

As of June 2009, 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 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'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 British news media regularly used the site to garner examples of fan reactions to Doctor Who.

Doctor Who lead actor David Tennant admitted in a 2005 interview with Doctor Who Magazine 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, 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, 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, not stalking Nick Briggs 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 and composer Murray Gold 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" one character tells another that the TARDIS is not a real police box and mentions that the windows are the wrong size as evidence. Episode writer Steven Moffat confirmed in 2007 that this line was an in-joke 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 is run by most of the Forum's support staff. Gallifrey Base officially opened on June 13, 2009.