The SDMB, in its current form on this web site, will be turning 10 this year, will it not? Does anybody know the day?
Happy birthday SDMB! Sure, I complain about stuff, like the broken search engine, but it likely this is the site I spent the most time at in the last decade of my life. It’s a mighty big internet, so I think that’s saying a lot.
Member #1 doesn’t work, but #2 is Lynn Bodoni, who joined March 9th, 1999.
Hookers and blow for everyone!
Do I have Alzheimer’s? My profile says I joined in July 2001, but I remember posting on the message board in 1997 or 1998.
Might that have been on the old AOL boards? Those predate the current site.
We were on AOL from the summer of 1996-roughly April 1999. Columns and message board.
During the time The Straight Dope was on AOL the www.straightdope.com site served as a “placeholder” and you could read the new column there and get info but not much else.
You could could also see Usenet sites such as alt.fan.cecil-adams; these sites had their own following as well.
The AOL side closed April-May 1999, iirc. The AOL Straight Dope message board was visible for a while after that — and available through some playing with urls for several years after we had closed the door. It’s gone now, they finally cleared off that server at AOL.
The current incarnation of the Straight Dope Message Board started . . . I want to say April 1999 but that may or may not be accurate. It was a little bit after we got everything going good on the main Straight Dope site, I think, so it’s possible we may not have been open for business until as late as May. Not sure where the first postings are – we were on another message board software and we’ve been through a lot of changes since then.
Ha! That was my 21st birthday.
Regardless, it’s been a major part of my Interwebs experience. I’ve looked at a lot of message boards, signed on with a few, but none compare to the SDMB.
Had to be at latest March 1999 when it started, since that’s my join date (unless those are inaccurate).
but were there hookers and blow for everyone?
What are the oldest accessible posts?
This appears to be the oldest:
Notice it has been damaged, all the user names are missing.
Ed’s join date was 02-18-1999.
It might, since the thread Fear linked to, number 471, has an OP date of March 10. Seems fair to me to proclaim throughout the land that this Wednesday is DopeDay.
I’ll bring pie.
I’ll invite Dopey, and he can bring the other Dwarts if they want to come along. You already said Snow is coming, with the hookers.
I also vote that 2/18, this Wednesday, be considered the SDMB’s 10th anniversary in its current form.
What say you, Admins?
You can read through the text of subsequent posts to get some of the usernames from what used to be quote tags and people’s in-post signatures. TubaDiva made the second post in that thread (as currently ordered; in some cases of board hiccups posts have been re-ordered). Also included are CatBiker, Eutychus, and people referred to as “Monty” and “Chip” (though these may not be their exact usernames), among others.
We had a select group register and it was beta testing for a while first, it wasn’t wholesale open to the world until a little later. You were on our shakedown cruise. 
Thread numbers from the early days aren’t entirely reliable: The board originally ran under UBB rather than vBulletin, and the thread numbers got juggled around some in the transition. IIRC, UBB had separate numbering for each forum (thus, thread #572 in General Questions would be different from thread #572 in Comments on Cecil’s Columns), so it wasn’t really possible to keep the same numbering through the transition.
Member #1 was TubaDiva.
At that time, the board software was somewhat wonky, and her original registration was lost in cyberspace.
That was my 29th birthday.
Makes it easy for me to remember, anyway! 