theantichristatheistheretic posed a question wondering how long this forum has been around, and it occurred to me that there is some history here, and perhaps others might be interested in it.
I began debating online on what I believe was the very first online debate 'forum' in regards to these matters. We're talking about 1993-1994. The site was called "Man is Man Made" and the last time I looked, the site was still listed in yahoo's atheism directory, but the link was dead. Anyway, it wasn't really a forum. It was more like one big long thread. Fun stuff.
They started up with those forums with those annoying 'threads' where you had to click on each new response to read it, and I lost interest.
Right about 1998 I was teaching in Rockford and I received this spam email inviting me to participate in a discussion forum at
www.defendingthefaith.com. As you can see, the domain is now available. Punks. Anyway, that forum sky-rocketted in participation. A lot of the members were people coming in just to complain about the spam. At least a few of the members were referred to the forum by the originator of the forum itself, who incidentally, never participated.
That forum went gang busters for awhile. Here I met Heretic, Dannyboy, Tony N, Joel, Cimics, Apollos, PreachinJesus, Sought&Found, Nojcforme, Dreys, and some others you'll see in the memberlist, here. These folks know right away what I'm talking about if I invoke AW or GIO. AW went and got herself married and I think she lost interest in forum debates. Too bad for Harry- he had the biggest crush on her.
For some reason, forum participation started to drop off. A big part of it had to do with the forum software itself- it was a little bulky. There was no way to keep members informed of new developments. There was no way to contact them at all, in fact. So, except for some die hards, I think people just sort of forgot about it, and the forum owner definately wasn't pushing it anymore. It was no longer linked off of his site's main page, even.
It got to the point where it was pretty much just GIO and JoJo going at it. It was about this time that I realized (I certainly wasn't the only one) that this forum was going to have the plug pulled on it at any time. I was starting to gain some know how in web hosting at that time, myself, so I installed a forum on my domain here at
www.sntjohnny.com and invited most of the old DTF crowd over. There weren't that many still visiting, so it took some effort to let them know, but eventually we had a decent nucleus here again.
Since I am opposed to spamming, however, membership growth here has been quite a bit slower. I advertised on google until google declared it a 'hate site' because of some of the homosexuality debates going on, so I took my limited funds to yahoo. Yahoo so far has treated me right, and when I have some spare money, I throw it into some yahoo advertising. Most of the new members- but not all- since the transition- have been through search engine advertising.
The first forum is actually still in existence. Here it is:
http://www.sntjohnny.com/xmb/Because of some feature limitations, however, we migrated from that forum, which used the 'xmb' forum software, to this one, which uses phpbb.
As you can see, that forum had some 15,000 posts. Some good times were had.
The first phpbb forum went just fine for quite awhile there, without any bumps or wiggles until this summer, when it was hacked and hacked hard. There were some 30,000 posts up to that point, and I'm annoyed that we lost them. I still have hopes of finding someone with more know-how then me to take the raw SQL data back ups that I have to restore that forum (to March, 2005) at least for archival purposes.
So, that brings us to this incarnation. The fourth 'forum' that many of us have shared together, now going on seven or eight years. Hopefully it is the last 'forum' on sntjohnny.com, but with dastardly dastards out there, one never knows. I do know that more frequent backups are made....
And that's the story.
