THEY are members of one of the country’s most clandestine communities. Predominantly female and in many cases highly educated, they have gathered — unbeknown even to their husbands — under assumed names to meet “like-minded people” for more than two years.

But this morning this mysterious group will wake up to find its cosy world in tatters. Yesterday the BBC axed the majority of its online message boards.

The thousands of people who spent guilty lunch hours or spare evenings logging on to the BBC website to deconstruct North & South or ruminate over Dirty Den’s unfathomable sexual charisma, say they have been maliciously turfed out of cyberspace.

Having succumbed to her favourite show’s talent for the melodramatic, one EastEnders superfan likened the cull to Hitler’s 1934 purge: “This is the BBC’s night of the long knives.”

Since Tuesday, when the BBC broke the news, users have been mobilising what little consumer power they can muster: petitioning, and being ignored by, Michael Grade, the Director-General, and appealing to journalists to take up their cause.

In a call to arms, “airsandgraces”, a long-time pundit on the board devoted to the BBC’s adaptation of the Elizabeth Gaskell novel, North and South, wrote: “Why do they think they can bully a bunch of middle-aged women? I am sorry that to be middle-aged, middle class and female is to be a nonentity in this day and age.”

She, like many of her peers, is furious that while boards devoted to male-orientated factual subjects such as football have survived, message boards attached to dramas and soaps have been axed.

Particular venom is reserved for Sophie Walpole, the BBC’s head of interactive drama and entertainment, and the woman ( or “cow” as she is described by one North & South stalwart) whose decision it was to pull the plug. “I don’t think this woman has actually looked at the North & South site,” said one of the 127 women who have e-mailed The Times in the past 24 hours about the decision to shut the board. “It is full of articulate talking about conditions in Victorian times or Elizabeth Gaskell.

“We’ve got the stuff between our ears but we don’t have the opportunity to have this level of stimulating debate in our everyday lives.

“So many of the people using it are elderly or they’re stay-at-home mothers and this is their link to the world.”

Ms Walpole said that the message boards had been taken over by small cliques. “I’m quite happy they have made friends there but I’m not sure that talking about hairdressers or whether or not they fancy Ian Beale is a good use of public space,” she said. “Some of these message boards have been up for four years and they have run their course. A lot of what is said on the boards doesn’t even qualify as a conversation, it’s just noise and it puts off other users of the site.”

Her opinion is born out by one of the final notes posted on the EastEnders site. It reads: “stop being such a cow you sado, coolgirl is cool actually and we have a lot of mates on this board who are also a lot cooler then u!”

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