Lojbanic Forums

This page contains a list of various forums in which people discuss Lojban or discuss in Lojban, in approximate order of popularity as far as the main community is aware.

Lojban IRC

Lojban IRC is very active, with 75 or more people in channel most of the time. It is by far the best way to practice real-time Lojban conversation, and sometimes it's possible to get people there to join voice chat sessions, as well. Lojban IRC provides an excellent informal meeting place for conversing quickly in Lojban. It is beginner-friendly, as well. The IRC channel can be reached by pointing your IRC program at irc.lojban.org or using our web-based IRC client and entering the #lojban channel, or the good-looking freenode Web IRC.

There is also a #jbopre channel, for less-topical discussion by Lojbanists.

Here is an IRC cheat sheet for people who are still learning Lojban.

Primary Web & E-Mail Forums

The two main forums for persistent, threaded conversation are presented as both web forums and e-mail mailing lists, using Google Groups. There is also an announcement list, which should reach just about everyone actively involved in Lojban with an email address.

The Main Forum

The Lojban General Web Forum / Mailing List is probably still the best way to reach a broad cross-section of the Lojban community for active discussion. It has about 500 subscribers, and has existed more-or-less continuously since 1989.

To subscribe to the list via email (in case you don't want to use the Google Groups interface), write an email to: lojban+subscribe@googlegroups.com

Any conversation at all about or in Lojban is on-topic for this list. For discussions specifically about learning the language, the Beginners list is a better choice. For discussions solely in Lojban, there's jbosnu, but it's got a much smaller subscriber list.

The Beginners Forum

The Lojban Beginners Web Forum / Mailing List is for discussions related to learning Lojban. Anything about how to understand a part of the language, how to learn it better, study tools, actual teaching sessions, and so on, is on topic. Nothing else is.

To subscribe via email, write to: lojban-beginners+subscribe@googlegroups.com

The Announcement List

The Lojban Announcements Web Forum / Mailing List is for single posts on topics of general community interest.

All posts to this list are moderated, and all must include a description for where followup conversation should go. For example: "there are now Lojban flashcards on smart.fm; follow up discussion should go to the Beginners list" (but presumably with more detail). This is NOT a discussion list. The list does not set Reply-To, so you should set it to where you want followup discussion to go, if you know how.

The announcement list sends to just about every Lojban email list there is. People can also subscribe to it directly, if they want to get announcements of general community interest but do not want to be on the main mailing lists.

Anything likely to be of interest to large segments of the Lojban community is on topic. In particular, "I'm starting Lojbanic project X and need help/feedback" is what the list is primarily intended for.

Other Mailing Lists

Other than the primary mailing lists, the following special interest lists exist:

• xedbig, AKA Hedwig, a private, moderated list with rules (you must be nice, you must speak in Lojban, and you may not criticise how other people speak Lojban)
• nunkei fi la'e lu lo do ckiku ma zvati li'u lu'u (Play "Where are you Keys?: Lojban")<br />
• lojban-pl, the Polish Lojban list
• budjo, for discussion of Buddhism
• kasyjda, for discussion of the chaos religions, such as Discordianism
• the bpfk mailing list, for language development issues
• xadni, a largely unused list for discussion of the experience of having a body, or something like that
• le jbocertu cu bau casnu vecu'u la jbosnu (nothing but spam these days)
• The jboske, or lojbanic science list is for extremely detailed discussions of technical and linguistic issues related to Lojban. (Subscribe at the lojban.org mailing list interface.)
• jbofanva is a mailing list for translation projects.
• jefnuz is a subscribe-and-don't-post list for receiving the weekly community news.
• snakarni is a list for audio-bloggers, especially for CinchCast users.
• loĵbanistoj is a lojban mailing list where discussions occur in Esperanto

Voice

• The Lojbanic Phone Group: arrange a voice call (phone or VoIP) with another Lojban speaker at any skill level.
• Mumble: a vocal chatroom
• Cinch is an audio-blogging service which allows its users to record directly to the website or phone in to record.

Microblogging

As microblogging has become more popular among the internets as a whole, it's also started to be noticed in Lojbanistan.

identi.ca

Sometimes known as la .aidentikar. There's a Lojban group called !lojban.

Twitter

Lojbanic posts on Twitter are sometimes tagged #lojban, but it's also fun to search for Lojban without the # to see what random strangers are saying about us!

Other Forums

jboselkei

jboselkei is an online game of translation from English to Lojban, featuring rating calculation for users. If you don't know how this or that is translated to Lojban, ask it in jboselkei, and as the game proceeds, expect to see one or even more translations of your 'post' made by jboselkei players, with comments. If you are an experienced lojbanist, you will always find a couple or more challenging 'tough nuts' awaiting your translation and promising rating points. jboselkei first appeared in Beta form in mid March 2006, and was upgraded for appearance and usability in November 2006. Playing in jboselkei is very exciting; you are welcome to join!

The Lojbanic Interactive Story

The Lojbanic Interactive Story is a web-based story writing forum. The story itself is all in Lojban. Anyone can add to it, please go contribute!

LiveJournal

There has been a LiveJournal community for Lojban for a long time, though it's often sleepy.

Reddit

• /r/lojban

Archives Of Past Discussion

Mailing List Archives

There are locally stored archives of a number of lists.

• The main Lojban mailing list is no longer updated
• The lojban-beginners list is no longer updated
• lojban-es, the Spanish Lojban list
• lojban-fr, the French Lojban list
• jboske, the list for technical discussions of Lojban
• The BPFK announcement list

The Google Groups lists should have complete, searchable archives stored in Google Groups itself.

In addition to this, for research purposes, there are as-complete-as-humanly-possible archives of all Google Groups lists stored as UNIX mail files on one of the lojban.org computers. If you need access to them, mail the LLG secretary.

IRC Logs

public logs of the lojbanic portions of the IRC channel are available.

Note: the logs are filtered so that they contain only lojbanic text. However, you might still be offended by the things discussed there. If you are, that's your problem, and the LLG explicitly disclaims responsibility for anything said on the IRC channel, including by members or officers of the LLG.
Furthermore, no guarantee is made as to the correctness of the Lojban therein.