Old threads with posts dating back to July of '99 or earlier come up with all the posters listed as “Guest”. What causes /caused that?
I’m pretty sure of one thing: it wasn’t the switch from ubb to vBulletin.
Here is a thread that spans the gap. The older posts, prior to Aug '99, show the poster’s name as “Guest” and the newer ones on the second page (starting with late Aug '99, about a month after the last “Guest” post) have regular user names. vBulletin, on the other hand, seems to have arrived in late April of 2000, eight months after the divide between “Guest” posts and posts where the username was retained. This thread contains the earliest mention of “vBulletin”, and the first posts were clearly created before the switchover, and yet (with odd exceptions like Jerry Davis’s posts) they have usernames throughout. (Quite a batch of other threads with posts mentioning “vBulletin” also appear on or shortly after April 28 2000, so I think I’ve got the date on that one nailed down pretty good).
So: real usernames on both sides of the divide between ubb and vBulletin, but 8 months prior to that, an older gap of some sort and posts prior to that gap lost the identifying codes that connect the post with the person who wrote it, while (with only occasional exceptions) all newer posts still know who wrote them. What happened back then?
I wasn’t around back then, so this is a WAG:
Ubb (and probably vBulletin too) allow the administrators to choose a posting level of “anyone” or “registered users” in the security options. I guess that when the SDMB started to pick up a bit of size, they restricted posting to registered users. Prior to that, some people may have chosen to register anyway to preserve their board identity and to make sure nobody attempted to impersonate them. All this just happened to occur in the ubb days, but could just easily have happened under vBulletin.
Just a guess.
At the time in question, the SDMB upgraded BB software (in this case, from Ultimate BB to the current vB). Some of the usernames (non-active posters) didn’t survive either that transition, or one of the upgrades we’ve had since then. I’m wondering myself, specifically why certain names didn’t make it, and certain ones did.
But in threads that old, even mod posts are labeled as “Guest”, so it can’t be that people just didn’t register.
All I know is that in some old threads, posters who later changed their names are listed as “Guest” - for example, Eve, in one of the Burma-Shave threads, was “Guest” before name-change and her lovely self after.
We’ve always require registration in order to post. I don’t know exactly what happened when, but I THINK that we had an upgrade or two of UBBS. I’m not sure. I do know that we used to have the boards crash every afternoon about 3:30.
Troy McClure, ol’ buddy, you ain’t reading! I told you it wasn’t the transition between ubb and vB!
I suppose it could have been an upgrade from one version of ubb to another, but you’d think people would have noticed at the time: WAI-ILL!! WHY ARE ALL MY OLD POSTS STRIPPED OF MY NAME?? WE CAN’T SEARCH!! OUR PRICELESS LIBRARY OF TOTALLY EXCELLENT POSTS IS ALL MESSED UP NOW!!! — right? I would’ve been among the wailers, I’m sure!
OK, as that sinks in I begin to realize that this implies that the disappearing of the names didn’t occur in August of '99 after all, couldn’t have, I’d remember the screaming, so what must’ve happened instead is that at some very-much-later point something caused all the posts from just before late August '99 and earlier to lose their usernames, at some point far distant enough from August '99 that none of those old threads were still hanging around on the first pages. Lynn, you say we went through several versions of ubb before switching to vB? Could it be that vB was compatible with the version of ubb that we were using, but maybe not-so-compatible with posts dating back to earlier versions of ubb? Or even that later upgrades from vB to brighter shinier versions of vB lost us the backwards-compatibility?
C’mon, work with me here. We need some good theories going here…
It’s a conspiracy. The MAN keeping us down. nods
…well, you said you wanted theories!
We have noticed that but I for one have never figured out exactly what happened (the several theories I’ve had have all had a counter-example).