Not a mod, but my $.02 worth. (And I’ll expect to be getting change back)
How will a history of the Dope be possible without a section for noteworthy contributors? Sure, some of them are noteworthy in a tubgirl kind of way, but they were part of what has made the Dope what it is today.
This has been a real trip down memory lane. I wonder if there is a plan to preserve the SDMB database for future generations? All these old threads and topics we discussed provide quite an insight about the people of our time. It would be a great shame to permanently loose all this conversation. Can it all be saved for the future?
There’s no rule against talking about people who have been banned. (And if this is a project being done off-board, it’s out of our “jurisdiction.”) We’d discourage arguments about long-ago bannings and things like that, but a history of the board would be rather scanty and lacking in character if you couldn’t talk about people like The Grapist.
That’s “Winter of Our Missed Content” - it has to be said that way to be a play on the famous “Winter of Our Discontent.”
Did anyone post The Princess Jedi Bride yet?
Someone crossposted that thread to some other subdivision of the web, and I followed it back over here… and never left. Yes, that thread is the entire reason I’ve wasted so many man-hours on the 'Dope.
Anyone got a link to it?
Funny things said during lovemaking/intimate moments.
(What can I say, it’s a knack.)
Looking back over those great old threads, I’m struck by how many posters have ‘Banned’ under their names.
Thanks!
(I didn’t want to waste one of my precious board searches- thanks for taking the bullet for me. 
)
No prob, bob. FYI, if you do a Google search and add the string “site: boards.straightdope.com” to the end of your search query, it’s pretty good at finding old threads. You can’t get as specific as you can with the on-board SDMB search engine, of course, but being able to search more often than every 5 minutes makes up for a lot.
I’m pretty sure they haven’t completely. I started a thread on here during the first week or so of December, 2001. I’d lost my virginity, had a critical equipment failure, and posted on here for support (this was, of course, before I learned that some things were better left in LiveJournal). That thread is gone.
I also don’t see any threads started by me between then and March. The boards weren’t out for those entire three months, and, given the amount of time I wasted on them, I’m sure I must’ve started at least one other thread.
That being said. I posted threads when I lost my virginity, when I broke up with that boyfriend, when I got engaged, when my ex-husband started questioning his gender identity, and when I got divorced (only partially due to that gender question). This is kind of creepy.
Winter of our Missed Content…the board was hacked and while TPTB were getting things back up, they set up another board over on another host. It had a bit more bells and whistles (including the annoying WhoView function) but it was a respite, a port in the storm, as it were.
The Lost Weekend was when TPTB were doing some upgrades, and basically, anything that was posted during a three day period wasn’t going to be migrated over. I believe they suspended the rules for the Pit and we had ourselves a frickin’ free-for-all that was a lot of fun, knowing the posts weren’t going to be saved.
Only once. 
I’m loathe to start up a second copy of this thread again, but it’s been seven years and a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. We do still have (almost) the whole damn thing archived and indexed : What If The Lord of the Rings Had Been Written By Someone Else …. So if anyone wants to keep it going, we’ve set up a form where you can still submit new writings to the archive.
Personally, I’d love to see it in the style of, say. Glenn Beck or Orly Taitz. 
And a number of different smilies, as I recall. Remember Smashie?
Oh, yes, dear dear Smashie. It was a taste of what vBulletin could be like…
I can’t do a search right now, but does anyone remember the Cooler of Death?
I remember many of these. I don’t recall when I delurked, but surely it’s been about 10 years for me? There was a serious Pit thread about rape (it stopped being an insult fest and became a serious and honest conversation about rape/sex etc); that was some years ago.
Funny and fun threads–too many to count. Scylla and Sampiro are excellent storytellers. Wasn’t there a thread started by someone who “discovered” a small box and wasn’t sure what was in it, and it led to more installments and spy rings, buried treasure, exotic places etc?
As can be seen, I am hopeless at remembering exact details when it comes to threads.
And who can forget the Great Rift when the ads came?
There is evil in my backyard. It’s in a cooler.
By the venerable Velma
As ivylass said in a post after yours, this was when the Board went down. For three months.
Ah-ha! I found the Scylla cow-in-the-pool thread:
The thread so funny, they Threadspotted it twice. Here ya go.
Didn’t we have some sort of “flaming icon” for a very very short period of time?