A number of things happened in GD. One is back in 2000 that there was pent-up demand to discuss certain hot button issues like abortion, Christianity, atheism, sexual preference, guns, glibertarianism, Ayn Rand, and race. Another is that this board had more relative reach before Wikipedia came into its own years later, and google decided that they didn’t like vBulletin forums like the SD. Also, it hadn’t quite sunk in that internet debates don’t matter.
Most importantly, we had more conservatives here, so there was a lot to debate. They even had the upper hand in gun threads for many years. A thousand cuts ensued, the first one being massive policy failures by US conservatives starting with the Iraq War, continuing through the financial crisis, with a steady drumbeat of failed supply side policies. A few conservative wisecrackers stuck around, but trollish line dancing eventually gets Modded away after many years of patience.
Trump was the final nail in the coffin. Defend him today, and you are likely to get the rug pulled out from you tomorrow. Personality cults don’t work too well in debate forums.
Finally, conservatism had its own internal problems. Conservatives used to loudly boast about their principles, only to quietly or not so quietly vote for Trump, proving those principles were a lie. That’s not something that works well in a debate forum dedicated to fighting ignorance.
Also, the spun-out Politics forum absorbed much of GD’s activity. I suppose a certain website absorbed a number of conservatives, demographically speaking.
As a long time fan of the SD books I used to look at the Usenet boards.
When the SDMB was no longer on AOL I became an active lurker.
I became a member around 2003 with a username and email address I’ve long since forgotten.
I made a rather dumb comment in some thread, other users pointed out my inanity, my feelings were hurt and like a delicate snowflake I flounced off never to return.
Until 10-6-2008 when I rejoined under my current name and Eddress because I couldn’t remember my old name etc.
If you’re not interested in all this, don’t read it.
In older threads, from before we switched to this board, links to other threads are now broken because of the different naming convention. If you take one of those broken links and plug it into the wayback machine, you can still view the old thread and on the vB version of the board. And in that old thread, you can hover over the poster’s usernames and get the number.
The trick is finding a link to a thread you’ve posted in. For me, the easiest way was to a do a google search for my user name (which didn’t have an underscore, making it easier to find old threads), along with “this thread” (hoping for a link from one thread to another) and site:boards.straightdope.com
As an example, doing that got me this thread:
In that thread, I posted a link to this thread, as seen here by the wayback machine:
and from there you can hover over usernames to get the numbers.
Side note: interestingly, the old vB style links now work. They still show the old URL but it takes you to the current version of the page.
(ETA, then stick that number in your profile somewhere so you can find it when we do this again in a few years)
You can also use Discourse search for that. We switched in Jun 2020. So a Discourse search for [@me before:2020-06-01] would return every vBulletin post you ever made. “@me” is search shorthand for whoever is making the search.
Of course that’s not quite true since the search system is throttled to 50 results max. But starting from those base search terms, add other words or qualifiers you think will lead to a thread containing a thread cross-reference.
I was just basking in the discussions of people a lot smarter than I was. And I wasn’t quite sure about the unwritten rules here (or whether the smartypantses here were what one might call sane).
I’m glad I did, and I’ve given the “Lurk For a Decade” advice to some overly eager newbies since then.
Ooh, I’m glad this thread was bumped up. I didn’t know until just now that Elmer_J.Fudd was actually PapaBear. I thought you were lost to the ages long ago! I also remember that you were the first to reach 1000 posts, and that we were all pretty impressed by it. I think it took me another six or seven years to reach that mark.
I was another person who came over from the AOL board in 1999. My original membership number was quite low but I changed my screen name about a year later and that reset it.
I also remember that you were the first to reach 1000 posts, and that we were all pretty impressed by it. I think it took me another six or seven years to reach that mark.