kbasa
10-04-2005, 09:11 PM
Yeah. Unbelievable, huh? Does this guy have a job? What the heck is up with allllll those posts?
I guess this is what happens when you've managed to be struck with a case of keyboard diarrhea and are early on to a forum. I figured that maybe some history would be in order here as we seem to be growing by leaps and bounds almost daily.
We first got started on the exact same day that the US invaded Iraq. I was in a hotel room in LA when Visian threw the switch and we went live. For about a week or so before that, we'd been trying to figure out which forums to put up, when to go live, were we going to have enough moderators and all kinds of things. It was chaotic, but it was fun.
The master mind behind the whole thing was Ian. He and I had been talking on the IBMWR list and off line about how forums might be an excellent way for the membership of the MOA to be able to talk to the officers and directors in real time and vice versa. Additionally, we thought that having members find a way to speak directly to each other would really help enhance the "feeling of family" the club is really about.
So Ian did the hard parts and sent me a link one day. And, lo and behold, he'd managed to get a copy of vBulletin up and running and we had a forum. We had only a few of us early on. Ian, me, MrsKbasa, Rob Nye, fish, Ted and Don Eilenberger. We threw the switch and all of us started cross posting to other forums and mailing lists to let folks know the forum was up and running.
I watched the tanks roll across the desert and watched folks registering for the forum. I figured we were on our way. But forums, like babies, take time to develop a personality and get on their feet. Members slowly joined, but a busy time on line was when we had a couple dozen folks.
Overtime, we broke a thousand members and we considered it a real milestone. We started to get coverage in ON and the forum grew some more. We had coverage of the Iron Butt a couple years ago and we grew some more. And then, finally, I think we reached the tipping point. We saw the midwest guys putting together a track day, campouts, the birth of the Rounders, we've got things going on on the west coast this month that will have a couple of forum members from back east coming to join us.
We're usually seeing somethign on the order of 300 unique registered members every day. We're nearing 100,000 posts. We have almost 5600 members and register, on average, about 30 MOA members a day. This place is starting to be like a rally running on your desktop all day long. It's a real community.
But mostly, we've all made a whole bunch of new friends. And that includes me. I've made some friends here that will be folks I know for the rest of my life.
And back when Ian was talking to me about the forum, that's exactly what we had in mind for anybody that cared to join - a mechanism that allowed the MOA to help members make a whole bunch of new friends.
Welcome aboard to the new folks, glad to see you again to the older folks and thanks for having me to all of ya.
http://kbasa.smugmug.com/photos/2728075-L.jpg
I guess this is what happens when you've managed to be struck with a case of keyboard diarrhea and are early on to a forum. I figured that maybe some history would be in order here as we seem to be growing by leaps and bounds almost daily.
We first got started on the exact same day that the US invaded Iraq. I was in a hotel room in LA when Visian threw the switch and we went live. For about a week or so before that, we'd been trying to figure out which forums to put up, when to go live, were we going to have enough moderators and all kinds of things. It was chaotic, but it was fun.
The master mind behind the whole thing was Ian. He and I had been talking on the IBMWR list and off line about how forums might be an excellent way for the membership of the MOA to be able to talk to the officers and directors in real time and vice versa. Additionally, we thought that having members find a way to speak directly to each other would really help enhance the "feeling of family" the club is really about.
So Ian did the hard parts and sent me a link one day. And, lo and behold, he'd managed to get a copy of vBulletin up and running and we had a forum. We had only a few of us early on. Ian, me, MrsKbasa, Rob Nye, fish, Ted and Don Eilenberger. We threw the switch and all of us started cross posting to other forums and mailing lists to let folks know the forum was up and running.
I watched the tanks roll across the desert and watched folks registering for the forum. I figured we were on our way. But forums, like babies, take time to develop a personality and get on their feet. Members slowly joined, but a busy time on line was when we had a couple dozen folks.
Overtime, we broke a thousand members and we considered it a real milestone. We started to get coverage in ON and the forum grew some more. We had coverage of the Iron Butt a couple years ago and we grew some more. And then, finally, I think we reached the tipping point. We saw the midwest guys putting together a track day, campouts, the birth of the Rounders, we've got things going on on the west coast this month that will have a couple of forum members from back east coming to join us.
We're usually seeing somethign on the order of 300 unique registered members every day. We're nearing 100,000 posts. We have almost 5600 members and register, on average, about 30 MOA members a day. This place is starting to be like a rally running on your desktop all day long. It's a real community.
But mostly, we've all made a whole bunch of new friends. And that includes me. I've made some friends here that will be folks I know for the rest of my life.
And back when Ian was talking to me about the forum, that's exactly what we had in mind for anybody that cared to join - a mechanism that allowed the MOA to help members make a whole bunch of new friends.
Welcome aboard to the new folks, glad to see you again to the older folks and thanks for having me to all of ya.
http://kbasa.smugmug.com/photos/2728075-L.jpg