This is far too big a coincidence to go unnoticed.
I wonder if the SDStaffen have The Prisoner costume parties and stuff. I bet they do. I bet they’re lots of fun too… and I bet they’d never invite people with unimpresseve numbers like you (5689) and me (12316). Maybe we should start our own theme club. How about Get Smart or something?
There weren’t bulletin boards back then, if that’s what you’re thinking. The Straight Dope is a newspaper column, and newspapers did, indeed, exist before computers. This board, the old AOL board, and the various USENET groups didn’t come about until computers were a bit more established.
In my head, I can still see the computer, my brother made back then and how surprised he was when it worked. He is now a computer expert that advises computer people all over the world. (However, he won’t advise newbies like me and doesn’t even live here.)
When did bulletin boards begin? When did the Straight Dope bulletin board begin?
When I put my cursor over the profile button the user info gets cut off. When I clicked on my profile the address bar said I was user 367.Whoo Hoo! I wonder if that’s true??
Yes, Qwisp, it is.
Since that would seriously decrease the frequency of that tired joke, I say your motion has been accepted. From now on, “Hi Opal!” can only be used if it’s the 36th item on a list. Deal. Neato.
(very) Willing inmate #11840… saying hello.
Your fellow staffers will be crucifying you in effigy, Coldie, for the number of lists in future posts that are drawn out to 36 items so that that last one can be “Hi Opal!”
And you know I’m right! 
Did we ever figure out when the Straight Dope Bulletin Board began? That date was not in the thread I read.
I thought this have some dark meaning…but… :eek:
Well, it would have been funny if Satan was 666.
But someone called maxzmomliz who posted 3 times then disappeared just doesn’t cut it.
I can’t believe this came up twice in the same week.
I was originally registrant #1.
However, I was also the first member of the SDMB to have a corrupted user file.
We could not repair/resurrect the file, so I had to re-register.
It happens sometimes. In the thousands and thousands of registrations, we’ve had . . . maybe a dozen of these.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
OK, I was wondering about this. How did the member numbers get to be in non-chronological order?
Looking at member #s/registration dates, we see that:
2: Lynn Bodoni 03-09-1999
6: Ed Zotti - 02-18-1999
14: Monty 02-19-1999
18: Ian Rey 02-19-1999
19: C K Dexter Haven 02-19-1999
20: Mike Lenehan (5 posts) – 02-20-1999
22: Eutychus – 02-20-1999
31: Cecil Adams – 03-10-1999
Looks like the db crash lasted from about 2.25.99 to 3.9.99
SDStaffRng registered as #29 on 2.25.99
Cecil registered as # 31 on 3.10.99
But … ::cue X-Files Theme:: there is no member number 30! If you had to re-register due to db crash , Tuba, Why didn’t you get a number in the 30-31 range? I don’t get it. How’d you get back down to # 2?
Shhhh. Cecil was annoyed at being #31 and suspended the laws of mathematics for a few days.
Talk about pathetic.
Originally, the boards were running Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB), but we switched over to vBulletin (vB), the software we currently used, in the spring of 2000. vB came with a feature to automatically convert over a UBB database, but there were apparently some quirks with the conversion, such that user IDs, registration dates, or both, got tweaked a bit. Likewise for posts and threads, so the thread with thread ID 1 is not necessarily the first thread on the board.