The first id# that’s valid is **Lynn Bodoni - Administrator ** #3 is Dan Kaplan - Administrator #4 is dunl - Administrator #5 is the first regular member **jkeene **who never posted! #6 is **Ed Zotti - Administrator **
:
: #11 is the first regular member who posted VegForLife - member #31 is **Cecil Adams - Administrator **
OK, I guess Cecil gets first dibs on #1,
But if he did want it, he would already have it, so it must be available.
Try to tell that to that evil conspriacy T.P.C. - The Phone Company - trying to control the world with brain implant chips. James Coburn tried to fight them off in The President’s Analyst (1967)
Interesting.
User #666 is one of those ‘ghosts’ who have a nonzero number of posts but no last post. The fellow’s name is maxzmomliz, registered 04-16-1999, three posts. Somewhat odd, I know why it happens (we had a board software switch, and not all the info got saved).
User #1313, name bdavis337, registered 06-01-1999, has never posted.
Prior to the introduction of vBulletin, the poster id numbers were not available. I’m not sure if they were internal to the program, or created from the registration dates when the switch occurred.
Anyways, you will see several members with registration dates in February of '99. These are all administrators, moderators, people at the Reader, or members of the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board. They tested the software for a while before the place opened up for the regular folk in March. Cecil is the first on this list. Jkeene (and some others) works for the Reader, as can be seen from his email address. The first among the common folk is Catbiker, who is just after TubaDiva, who is just after Cecil.
The idea seems to have been for moderators to have an official screen name and an unofficial one, but it seems to have never been implemented. For example, the user Private has the same email address as Dan Kaplan.