Have to admit my memory is not up to the task. How long did we have ubb? Did we switch to vbulletin because ubb sucked? Hard to imagine something as bad as vbulletin back then.
http://www.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/000280.html
This is the link I ran across. What did Forum2 mean? I remember not having many forums back then, Cecil Columns and Staff Reports. Was 280 a post number or a thread number?
Anything you recall about ubb will be welcome.
a) We used UBB when we first came over from AOL. We had General Questions, Great Debates, MPSIMS, the BBQ Pit, Comments on Cecil’s Column, Comments on Mailbag Answers, and About This Message Board. It looked like this:
https://web.archive.org/web/19990828095410/http://www.straightdope.com/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/Ultimate.cgi
Forum2 was “About This Message Board”. Forum1 was “Comments on Cecils Columns”. Forum5 was the BBQ Pit. Looks like they were numbered top to bottom as they appear on the main page, as waybacked above.
b) I don’t remember what the performance issue was with UBB, to be honest. I don’t recall having any personal frustration with it. Could have been limits on how many records a table could handle, and someone did the math and said “we gotta move”.
c) vBulletin was pretty decent at the time. It could quote posts! I mean do it for you! In the UBB days, I think we had to manually copy, then paste, then add the code to indent or offset it. Could be wrong about that, it’s been a long time.
d) We started off on one version of vBulletin — let’s call it 1.0 although it could have been version 19 for all I know. All the UBB posts were converted and looked fine when we came in after the conversion to vBulletin. Time ticked on. Then at a certain point we upgraded to a later version of vBulletin and the data format was changed with that version. Wellllll… all the threads that had originally been UBB but had had subsequent posts made in the vBulletin, they converted fine. And all the threads that had been created in vBulletin-the-first-version were converted fine. But any threads that had had no posts added to them after the UBB days, those threads lost their usernames. Nobody noticed for a long long time, because those were, by definition, long-dormant threads.
As a starting point, I started in April of 2001 and the vB conversion had happened already.
And the problems we eventually had with vBulletin were also because we outgrew it. IIRC, there was at the time a newer version of vBulletin that could handle our increased size, but we were frozen at several versions older than that, because versions past that point would have broken… something or other we had.
That doesn’t look familiar at all. I seem to recall only having 2 or 3 forums at the beginning, maybe not. Maybe on AOL?
That’s what kept me reading and not posting. Time out errors and double/triple posts. IIRC, no tabs back then so you needed different a whole new window to open multiple tabs.
Yes, I remember losing a bunch of posts, tho I didn’t remember why we lost them.
I followed a link here from snopes in 2000 sometime. I wonder if the switch to vB had been done already.
Too bad that wayback machine didn’t archive the actual threads. That would have been interesting.
That’s a bit like I remember, tho I don’t recall what the fix was that had been done. I don’t think even Jerry would remember if he was still around. 
No, that’s was a different issue. We lost a month’s worth of posts, give or take. Spend several weeks in exile on a different temporary board platform run by “BBBoy”. All those threads and posts were also lost, but we knew that in advance, that the temporary board posts would not be preserved.
But all that (referred to as the Winter of our Lost Content) has nothing to do with vBulletin-later losing all the USER NAMES from the early ubb era. Those posts and threads still exist. But they’re anonymous. It only happened in the threads created under uBB and NOT receiving any posts during the first version of vBulletin. The conversion to the later version of vBulletin screwed up the user names but only for those threads.
The AOL version had exactly two forums: General Questions and Comments on Cecil’s Column. MPSIMS was a thread within it, not a separate forum.
And the Winter of Our Missed Content wasn’t really from the message board software at all. The server just plain died, and then when that happened it came to light that it hadn’t been backed up as regularly as it was supposed to, so the newest backup was still a month-ish old.
The bastards ate my (first) 1000th post. 
With very few exceptions, all the threads going back to the dawn of UBB time are still right here. If you know how to look for them. Here’s the Welcome thread for all the folks coming over from AOL to join the new UBB-based Straight Dope Message Board, in 1999:
My thoughts, too. The wayback link looks like something from late '99 or 2000. I seem to remember more forums stating to build out a bit shortly after switchover, but there were only a couple when we first switched.
General Questions before April 1999
Comments on Cecil’s Column before April 1999
Those five forums date back to the big bang. March 1999 is pretty much the dawn of time for this place (not counting AOL). That leaves, from among the early forums, only Great Debates. I know for sure that IMHO was added substantially later. ETA: hmmph not that damn substantially later!
Great Debates apparently made its debut in late May of 1999. I had forgotten that it wasn’t immediately there, but awfully close to being one of the originals.
And… a search reveals that IMHO seems to have arrived in late June '99
ETA: in case anyone’s about to ask, all those posts that appear to have been created by “system”? That’s the current board software’s way of handing the posts I was discussing up above: threads created in UBB, then converted to vBulletin-original-version (looked fine) but nobody posted in it until after the board had been converted to vBulletin-later-version.
As I understand it, each of the old threads was reindexed in some way when someone posted to them using vBulletin-original-version; whereas if nobody did, that reindexing didn’t take place. Original vBulletin could display the old UBB-based way of referencing user names but later-vBulletin didn’t have that kind of backwards compatibility so those posts’ authors’ names got erased.
I’m almost certain that I was here when IMHO was created, and I think I was a mod at the time… but I didn’t join until early 2000.
Also, way back in the early days through fairly recently, there was also a separare forum “Comments on Staff Reports” (originally called something about “Mailbag”, and eventually merged with the one for Cecil’s columns). It might not have been there right at the Dawn of Time, because it took some time to set up Staff Reports (some of the infrastructure for that behind the scenes was another vBulletin board), but those definitely did predate my arrival (in fact, my first post was in that forum, commenting on an article from @JillGat ).
That would fit more closely with my recollections. I wonder if that batch of threads that predate July 1999 were moved to IMHO post facto instead of being created there?
I joined in December of 1999. I remember when you couldn’t post for an hour. By CST it was in the wee small hours of the morning, but for non US dopers it must have been a pain in the butt.
Yes. This was definitely the case in 2003. I did a lot of work in Taiwan at the time and there was an hour midday local time where I couldn’t post.
I know I was here when IMHO was created. 
I remember the creation of the Great Debates forum. It was initiated by a poster (or posters) who would proselytize by framing Christian messages in the form of questions and posted them in General Questions. That’s why there’s the reference to GD being the forum for witnessing.
Now removed though. Happened maybe a year ago.
That sounds about right. Cafe Society was the next one added, and it was at least a year or two later.
We actually tested a later version of vBulletin. Despite being a newer version of the same software, the database port did not go smoothly. We also felt that we were basically trading one set of bugs for another. The newer version wasn’t any less buggy, it was just different. But most importantly, the newer version had some security issues that the older one didn’t have, and the folks in charge were very sensitive to that. Security issues more than anything else killed that project.
As I understand it, the backups were still being done nightly, but the problem was that the database had grown to the point where it no longer fit on the backup tape, and no one noticed the error that it had been throwing.
Like the old saying goes, you never know how good your backups are until you need them.
I suffer from insomnia, so I used to run into that a lot despite being on the east coast of the U.S. (Eastern Standard Time). I vaguely remember it being sometime around 2 or 3 in the morning.