IIRC, we may not post about how long we’ve been on SDMB, " Anniversaries " and such.
It’s October 2019. For quite a handful of us, this autumn marks 20 years of involvement in our community.
Considering that milestone, and the fact that some Dopers / Mods / Admins may have fragments of the old AOL Board as well as nascent SDMB posts, could we be allowed to open a thread on this topic?
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Mom! MOOMMM! If he gets a party then I want one too!
It’s not fair. All the older kids get the get the good stuff.
I’d be surprised if there’s anything left from AOL other than, maybe, someone saving some of the text somewhere. So far as I know, the AOL boards wouldn’t have been google indexed and probably not in any cache or on the wayback machine.
I think you’d have better luck finding remnants of FFF. Did FFF overlap with AOL at all?
Really? Never heard of that. Go nuts, in the appropriate forum. I’d probably start with MPSIMS.
I feel like that’s an artifact from the old rules against post padding.
And the reminiscing begins.
Right. I don’t recall any rule against celebrating anniversaries, at least any that has been enforced in many years. Many years ago we had rules against “post parties” because they were prone to post padding, but now that many posters have counts in the tens of thousands there’s little point.
Here’s an example of a post count party that got shut down by a party-pooper mod.
Back in my day, we posted about old wallpaper patterns. And we liked it that way.
And we traveled three miles through the snow uphill both ways just to do it! 
I might still have transcripts from when I was a chatroom co-host (as “Joe Cool”); sent copies to TubaDiva a while back.
What about** TubaDiva**?
Man, when this place started, we used to read books to figure out what was going to be on TV! And then we rearranged our weeks around it!
And our *houses *had phone numbers!
She only made it there first because handy was banned. 
I can’t recall who was the head NIC of the Cold Prickly Brigade (CPB). Whoever it was, they weren’t doing all that hot a job, what with RevJimTull and ARG220 annoying up the place. 'Course you can’t expect raw hostility to work miracles. Trolls is trolls. Sock puppets were harder to determine because they weren’t registered as screen names but instead were AOL account names; to make a sock you would use one of the other available AOL screen names and log in as that person and come in to post.
One of the distant precursors to the Winter of Our Missed Content was the arrival of thread titles, aka the Debut of the Push Pins. Prior to that, all messages simply appeared in an uninterrupted feed – kinda like Facebook, except that the replies weren’t threaded below the original post so there was a lot of copying and pasting to help us keep track of which conversation it was about. Then the AOL powers-that-be decided to give us thread titles. But in the process they wrecking-balled the entire world of existing posts and when we logged in the whole environment was simply gone.
It’s probably safe to type the evil Tilded One’s name without much chance that he’s gonna reappear: ~PerkyDan. Or was it ~PerkyDan~? Mentioning him by name was akin to saying Beetlejuice three times. But I figure if he’s lurking and doing vanity searches, he’s probably got socks and is already stirring the pot, unrecognized and unbeknownst to us.
I remember moderating using a phone modem for the first couple of years-what fun.
You were Joe Cool?
Married to Jersey Diamond?
Tried to get yer pal Satan unbanned?
Tried to get Vanilla banned?
What’s upppppppp!!!
And my e-mail address; I still use that. I was giving it to someone at work and when I reached “@aol.com” her comment was “boy you really are old”. :smack:
Mine still does with wires and everything.
I remember when I first got on AOL and we basically did everything in flash sessions because the charge was by the minute. When the one-price-per-month came along all the chat rooms exploded. One of the reasons AOL called on so many of us to become “Hosts” – I don’t think they were really ready for it.
And I’ll go you one better as well ----- I was still using AOL dial-up into 2015. :eek:
I have all this stuff archived … including chat transcripts from AOL and big chunks of the AOL board … just not available on this computer.
I’ll have to see what I can resurrect but due to work and etc it will be Tuesday before I can get to it, sorry.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Mr Unsolicited and Bad Medical Advice? Along with Satan, how easy it once was to get banned! And I couldn’t stand Satan.