About
How It All Began
Welcome to the Dobbs Forum, the Doctors only Bulletin Board System, and the premier online community for Malaysian doctors since 2000. Access to Dobbs is free but the forums are available only to Malaysian doctors.
Dobbs has a long history, going back to circa 1997 when doctors wanted a discussion forum and those of you active at that time will recall Bulletin Boards like Jaring Medibase. The aim was to ultimately have a private doctors only forum and in 2000, Dobbs morphed into a full-fledged web-based system powered by Cold Fusion. Here’s a nostalgic screenshot from the internet archives:
Dobbs in the year 2000
This served its purpose for a while but was a cumbersome hand-coded system which was difficult to upgrade and customise.
In 2005, Dobbs moved on to an “off the shelf” forum powered by Snitz, and it gave us the capability to have both a private and public forum, the former being the private forum for doctors i.e. Dobbs.
Dobbs in the year 2005
Dobbs then moved on to a bbPress powered web forum with a huge archive of valuable discussions. In the era of the social network and the mobile, Dobbs became available on 3 platforms:
- As a web forum
- A closed Facebook group
- As a Telegram supergroup
The web forums in forum.mysdobbs.net ran from 2012-2018.
Dobbs in the year 2012
Members found the web forums powered by bbPress to be slow and not as responsive as they wished. From October 2018, we have moved to all new Bulletin Board Powered by SMF. The new Bulletin board is fast, responsive and host:
- general discussion
- case discussion
- online CME
- journal club
- job board
- trade zone
With this three-pronged approach, we hope that Malaysian doctors will continue to actively participate in Dobbs, a community for doctors by doctors, and without community participation, it won’t exist. Carry on Dobbers!
Dr Alan Teh
MBBS MRCP (UK) FRCP (Edin)
@palmdoc
Chief Dobber
Updated 5 June 2019
Please note:
- Usage of Dobbs is subjected to Dobbs Rules.
- The site Privacy and Usage Policy.
- DOBBS is privately funded and not affiliated with any other organisation.