Did the message board lag behind the rest of the site in the transition to the web? I ask because I’m having a bit of trouble trying to match my memory with the join dates. Judging by those for the earliest/oldest posters, the boards opened up in March. But I really want to say that I was reading the old columns during the fall of my freshman year, which was 1998-1999. Now, I know that it took me a while to notice that the boards existed, and a few months more of lurking before I first posted (right into the middle of an argument between Connie and Phil Dennison; quite the nice open-arms welcome for a newbie), so conceivably I could just be stretching the five months before I posted into a longer time period. But I gotta say that my memory of reading the Dope online in the fall of 1998 is pretty strong. And I know that I was never over on AOL. So do I have extremely-early-onset AD or were the boards a later addition to the web site?
-ellis
who is much too young to be losing his mind.
Just to shed a little more confusion on the whole searching for old posts bit…it only returns 206 of my 348, the oldest being on 8.11.1999. I’m quite positive that I didn’t post 142 times the first month I was on the board, so along with a potential 500 post cap, it looks like various board hiccups might have swallowed posts, too.
I’m not sure any such deliberate Pruning ever actually took place.
There was a time when one was imminent, they were going to delete all threads that had had no posts since (I think it was) January 2000. We were invited to rummage around and resurrect any threads we wanted to preserve for posterity. Then Jerry the Tech God found better hamster food or something and the boards started running faster and they never deleted them after all.
Quite a few posters believe that their oldest threads do not exist because they can’t bring them up with the search engine. But that is due in part to an early software changeover (NOT the change from ubb to vB, which was later, but apparently between one ubb version and the next), whereby all posts prior to the changeover lost the names of the person who’d posted.
Here, for example, is a thread I started. There are no posts to that thread (PS: don’t make any!) later than June of '99, and every person is identified as an anonymous Guest because the entire thread predates the sw change I’m referring to, but it quite obviously did not get deleted.
There are some threads that are missing in action, aside from the Winter of Our Missed Content. The thread in which Coldfire invited Mullinator to write naughty love letters to every gal who posted “do me” in the thread (which he then proceeded to do for page after page after page) is gone, for instance, as are some of the more famous meltdowns. I don’t know why and as far as I know, neither does anyone else, but I’ve never seen anyone on staff post “Yes, we did prune a bunch of posts matching the following description” and I don’t think they ever did.
(OPs by trolls have sometimes been quarantined in invisible forums or deleted outright, but that’s more weedkilling than pruning)
I get 500 results, too, some as far back as 5-1-99 for me. (I searched for threads started by me, not just ones in which I had posted. That may be the difference.)
I get 500 results, too, some as far back as 5-1-99 for me. (I searched for threads started by me, not just ones in which I had posted. That may be the difference.) Olentzero:
You can’t search by user name on the oldest posts. Read my explanation above. Your oldest posts (assuming you go back that far) don’t have names, so you’d have to know what to search on other than your name. (Although if someone quoted you I guess your name would be in the threads above the quoted section). I found mine by remembering my old signature: “Officially Designated Signature at Bottom of Post”. The old ubb signatures are retained as part of post content, which makes them searchable.
PS – ever since the latest vB upgrade, our search engine hasn’t been very reliable, some kind of problem with the index.
re: that there was indeed a purging, not to doubt your word, but any cite / ref on that?
The thread that I can’t find that may have been lost in the Winter of our Missed Content was my whole Newell Shredder thread. It’s a shame, that one was quite humorous.
Another low-impact doper here. I’ve left this board for monrths at a time (real life does tend to intrude at times), and not been up to more than lurking for other stretches. But I too may post more, now that I forked over an entire five bux .
I started reading Cecil fully 20 years ago, though. My sister from Tucson read me the gerbil-stuffing question from the second book, and I was hooked.
Okay, I’m confused. I used the Advanced Search function, entered my name, selected the option to search for posts by user, and got a ton of results. This seems to be the oldest one (4-29-99). My name appears as Guest in the OP, and “Lissa” appears no where in the thread.
Now I’m confused as well. My oldest posts don’t come up when I do an advanced search. As with some of the others who said above that their oldest posts are MIA.
I just assumed “that’s the way it is, the old posts that appear to have been crafted by Guest aren’t gonna come up when you search by name”. Now you’re telling me yours do anyway.
::does advanced search on ‘AHunter3’::
Yep, still pretty much the case.
::does advanced search on ‘Lissa’::
Hmm, not seeing that thread on foul language on pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… that was with search on user name (w/o exact match selected), view by thread (not post), sort ascending order by thread origin date. Retry with exact match, view by post, same sort order – again I am not getting the Foul Languages thread as your oldest; instead I am getting an Abraham Lincoln thread as if it were your oldest.
Aha, I see, you’re using the option of searching for threads started by the user name. Yes, using that I get the Foul Language thread as the first thread you started. And when I do mine, I get the “Dark Places” thread I mentioned above, which I said I could only find by searching by the text used as my sig line back then, because I was the person who actually started that thread.
Interesting that the names of the OP who started the thread are somehow preserved (and still searchable) but the names of the poster of any given post are not (and are therefore not searchable, as I said).
I know that my name won’t be on the post as author, but I was hoping it may work as a vanity search… someone must have mentioned my name before 2003! But alas…
