This month marks my 20th year of registration here on the Straight Dope Message Board. (Technically I’d been lurking for a year or two before that, and had been reading the main Straight Dope website since the mid-1990s, but I didn’t create a forum account until April 2001.)
I just wanted to give a big thank-you to everyone who’s been involved in running, moderating, or posting in the SDMB (and especially @Cecil_Adams and @Ed_Zotti for kickstarting it all). Apart from Slashdot, this is the only website I’ve been visiting almost every single day for the past 20+ years. Though I’m not one of the more prolific or memorable contributors here, I do very much (still) feel part of a thriving and cohesive online community, and moreover one that teaches me fascinating new things on an almost daily basis. We truly are “thousands of the smartest, hippest people on the planet”, and it’s been an immense pleasure interacting with you all—even the few “total dipsticks”.
To another twenty years of mutual edification, trivia swapping, cultural commentary, political debates, smug nitpicking, and glorious, vitriolic trainwrecks!
CONGRATUMALTIONS (or commiserations, whichever you prefer). My 20th anniversary comes up in Oct this year, but I didn’t lurk for long beforehand, maybe a week or so, then I jumped right in to the teeming fray.
Happy times, and may you be here for another twenty or more.
I remember when I got my first computer, one of the first things I did was look up “The Straight Dope” bc I had been a long time fan of the column and I had questions I wanted to submit.
Then I found out there are these things called “message boards” and there’s a whole community of us!
Single tear drop rolls down my face: “These are my people”. I’ve finally come home. Lol
Me, I wasn’t aware of the column until I got online. If you did any significant amount of web browsing in the early or mid-1990s, or spent much time on Usenet, it was practically impossible not to run across the Straight Dope website. It was referenced in scores of FAQs and Snopes articles.
Yeah, I didn’t have time to post this announcement on the exact day, but I figured that getting the month right would be close enough. But if I got the cake icon, I didn’t notice it.
6000 posts in 20 years is about one post per day, which is nothing to sneeze at, even if it isn’t quite in the same ballpark as other posters here. I know a lot of us have 5-digit counts, and for all I know there are some with more than 100,000. Of course, comparing SDMB post counts is a lot like comparing Slashdot user IDs, except in inverse. (FTR, mine is 65759. And I’ve got the same username there, too.)
For determining their legal drinking age, do memberships go by the jurisdiction in which their owners reside or the one where the SDMB servers are located?
Congratulations! Wonder if I am ever going to last that long. The way I feel, I am afraid not.
Where I come from we are allowed to drink long before we are allowed to vote. And we do it more often and in public! Different priorities, I guess. I suppose it sometimes shows in my posts.
Oh, yeah, I definitely remember that day. Checked the SDMB first thing in the morning, as I usually do, and watched the news—and our own commentary thereon—unfold in real time.
But if I got the cake icon, I didn’t notice it.
