The name WritingWest (or simply "West" to the regulars) has a long and venerable history. It began as a chat room name on classic msn, to honor an even older gathering of writers. "West" was a reference to a wing in New York's Algonquin Hotel, which hosted a daily luncheon gathering (The Round Table) in the 20's. Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woolcott, Heywood Broun, and Robert Benchley were among the famous writers, editors, and wits in attendance.
Over the years, to accomodate not only an overflow of chatters, but some occasionally acrimonious differences of opinion and general philosophy, msn started a companion chat room called, creatively, WritingEast.
Both WritingWest and WritingEast survived not only the occasional firefights between the rooms, but also the transition of msn from a proprietary service to an open internet access server. Those who have been around long enough remember msn 1.0 (fondly remembered as "the best"), msn 2.0 (wherein msn changed the chat servers from a proprietary program to an irc-compliant model), and msn 2.5 (when msn threw open its doors to the internet community).
We survived all of that, but we couldn't make it through msn's latest business model, known to the marketing guru's as "Communities." Or, in another longstanding tradition, "beta Communities," since nothing ever seems to get to actual completion with Microsoft and its products.
What msn apparently failed to understand is that we were already a community. Rumor has it that msn lost 35,000 members the day they closed their sponsored communities. Oh well. <giggle>