Those are fun to look at occasionally because a lot of posts back then had signatures at the end. With that and remembering old user names it’s surprising how much you can figure out from those posts.
Thanks for those links, that will be handy!
If I remember right, NYC was three a.m.
Don’t leave us hanging, details man. Did threads get moved there? Was it started blank? What were the reasons given for another forum?
Geez, I don’t remember that either. Getting old is hell on the memory. I wonder how much of the memory confusion is how little time we spent on AOL and ubb. Things just kind of ran together.
The Powers That Be contacted me after I let them know I would like to be a mod, and asked if I would like to be in charge of a new forum. It was started as a sort of Great Debates Lite, and some Not So Great Debates were moved there during the first few weeks. I know I was working from a slow as fuck AOL telephone hookup, but I got a great Straight Dope Moderator whiskey mug out of the deal.
I can also tell you that the most common forum move, during my first tenure as a moderator, was from GQ to IMHO. We didn’t go through and look for old GQ threads that would be better in the new forum, but if any got bumped after it existed, they probably would have been moved.
That’s what I remember. It worked similarly when Cafe Society was formed. Active threads were moved and bumped threads were moved as appropriate, sometimes years later.
That explains the unexpectedly early date for earliest IMHO thread. It’s going off the creation date of the first post in the thread, when it was no doubt in some other forum.
What the heck, did you suffer a blow to the head? I come here for fun and entertainment, I can’t imagine all the time people spend modding.
See, now that’s way better than a coffee mug! Or did they just send you a coffee mug and say it was for whiskey? Did the mug also time out two or three times before you got it? Most of all, did you have to buy your own jackboots back then?
I wanted to say thanks again for the links you put up earlier. Without them I would have kept putting it off again.
I remember there being quite a bit of chaos immediately after the decamp to the temporary board, because it had a bunch of weird features like animated emojis (smileys I think we called them back then), which people didn’t like, and there were placeholder parameters you could insert in a post that would be interpreted when someone viewed the page - there was one placeholder that would be replaced by the username of whoever was reading the page - so there were threads like “I think [user] is the best poster on this board!” - people reading it and seeing their own name there all flooded in to say “awwww, thanks!”, then got confused about the whole thing.
I think it only lasted less than a day before the feature was turned off - I think it was a BBcode called ‘who-view’. There were also codes for scrolling marquee and flashing text that were available at the very start but got turned off pretty fast.
I believe there was also one that could be used to insert a dynamically-calculated time in the post or title, so you could say "I have a secret and I will reveal it in this thread at ([time]+12)’ - something like that, making the reveal time perpetually 12 hours in the future.
We had our own native stuff that had to be turned off in ubb when we first came over. Originally you could enter HTML code as part of your post and it would be parsed and interpreted. Naturally some people couldn’t leave that opportunity alone without seeing what mischief they could do with it…
Smashy was on the temporary board. Putz was made to honor that dickhead Wally who faked his death before the hoax was out. It was custom and at some point it didn’t make it through an update and no one cared to remake it.
I still can’t believe how many people bought into that. It was contentious enough that mods would shut down threads about him, not wanting it dragged up again. He had the most top secret death ever, despite it being a very public death.
It was just before my time but was still talked about. In retrospect it should have been blatantly obvious but it was a more innocent time I guess. If anyone wants to know why the original snark board took off it was because it was place where speculation about Wally was allowed.
I come here for fun and entertainment, I can’t imagine all the time people spend modding.
Most of all, did you have to buy your own jackboots back then?