User #: 774
Join Date: 04-23-1999
Total Posts: 56,241
Posts Per Day: 8.01
Many thanks !!! 
( I need to post more. )
Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk
So, I have a question: when did the SDMB move from AOL to it’s present web form? Did one have to be an AOL user back in 1999 to have signed up?
Tripler
No, I’m not jealous . . . I just don’t remember.
From the start, you didn’t have to be an AOL Straight Doper to join up. One of the other places folks came in from was the usenet group alt.fans.cecil-adams (or something very close to that).
The AOL board had been going strong one year before I joined it in 1997. Like all discussion “areas” on AOL, the Dope experienced a change in formats in (I think) 1996:
BEFORE: messages were not threaded. You could re-use the same message subject line as a way to indicate that that’s what you were replying to, or you could change it, but when you jumped in to see what was new, you’d see a long list of new posts, not broken up into threads. Because you could reply to an existing post that had a subject and change the subject, a long never-ending subject originally titled “Who Was Mr Ruda Duda” was eventually changed by someone – manually changing the subject line – to “Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share”. So… now you know!
AFTER: the background of all such discussions changed to a graphic of plastic push pins (no big deal except that we all referred to “before push pin era” and “push pin era”); now, for the first time, there were threads! Instead of an amalgamated mass of individuals posts, each with a subject line, there were permanent thread titles!
AND: All the pre-pushpin posts evaporated poof so there was no there there on the first day of the pushpin era. I wasn’t there at the AOL Straight Dope, I was still hanging around in other AOL posting areas (many of them within The Exchange) when the changeover hit. I only assume by extrapolation that the absence of all pre-pushpin posts hit the AOL Dopers too. (Tuba? Did that happen?)
User #: 1204
Join Date: 05-23-1999
Total Posts: 7,695
Posts Per Day: 1.10
None of the AOL message board material was brought over to this site.
You are correct that it was a more rudimentary kind of operation there; it was a simpler time. 
We did have some early content here that got messed up in a system upgrade; the upgrade had some architecture changes in it and the older material we had didn’t convert well and sheared off the names from the posts. You can still see some of that material on the board today. The “Winter of Our Missed Content” came along a little later.
At least that’s how I remember it, but memory’s a funny thing and there’s been a lot of, um, adult beverage of choice since that time …
Ruda Dude did not morph into MPSIMS. That one led to an impossibly long series of rants about the origins of modern Jews branching out from an insult against the (then) Queen Mother by a rabidly anti-Semitic poster who was also carrying on a feud against the British while having no understanding of the Irish history he claimed to champion.
At about the same time, one of the many threads on the (then current) movie Titanic developed a branch when a young poster asked for help choosing wallpaper based on movie posters (I think) and the branch was re-titled Mundane Pointless Things I Must Share.
“Titanic wallpaper.” Based on the movie.
Yeah, I got those two threads confused. Titanic Wallpaper became MPSIMS.
Sorry, no, I meant back in the AOL days when the transition to “pushpins” occurred, did the old pre-pushpins AOL posts all vaporize, so AOL SBMD members came in to find a blank empty Teeming Millions posting board? It happened to other AOL message boards I was participating in. The pre-pushpins era boards were not threaded (aside from people re-using the same subject lines when they posted). One day we logged in and all boards had the “push pins” decor and from then on you saw threads, not individual posts with subject lines. And they didn’t bother to convert the existing posts, they just started everyone from scratch.
Aquí.
Skippy! Miss ya, man.
Your memory is better than mine; I have vague dreamlike memories of the AOL boards.
As for what they gave us, I DO remember there was a lot of “AOL giveth and AOL taketh away” over the three years we were there.
I come and go with lots of posts during some periods, but I also think I went a few years without posting anything.
User No.: 850
Total Posts: 2,666
Posts Per Day: 0.38
Join Date: 04-28-1999
Same here, and every once in a while I think “Hmmm, wonder if I should email an über-mod and see about changing my date?”
But then I quickly realize that this place is like a family, and no one in your family really cares about cow-towing to your little neuroses. So I decide it’s healthier to ignore that (and work on the quality of my posts instead)… and then I forget all about it.
I suppose we can give you the benefit of the doubt and trust in your truthfulness.
Post Count Circumscision
Band name!
Raising my hand!