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From The Fortean Times To Forteana: Our 10th & 20th Anniversaries

Yithian

Yithian

Parish Watch
Staff member
Joined
Oct 29, 2002
Messages
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Location
East of Suez
Am I right in believing that the message board will - at some stage this year - pass its tenth birthday? When did it go live? Is there a party planned? Will there be jelly and ice-cream?

I wasn't there at the birth, but we still have - at last inspection - a smattering of posters from that first year. Can they open the envelope of memory and embarrass one another with the board in its birthday suit and tales of shocking deeds?
 
I joined within a few weeks of the start. :D

I remember when this were all fields...
 
escargot1 said:
I joined within a few weeks of the start. :D
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And according to your profile that was in August 2001 - so, when would you put the happy day?
 
escargot1 said:
I remember when this were all fields...
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Can you remember the FT site before the message board? I recall that in around 1998/99 you could download the "Chupacabra Song", which was basicaly "Macarena" but with chupacabra replacing macarena in the lyrics. Eee, that were proper entertainment that was!
 
I joined, late 2001, but I had real problems with my Dutch language browser, at the time. Then, I joined again as someone else, for a year, or two and now I´m me.
 
I was on the FTMB before this one, so technically it's over ten years old. In this incarnation, it'll reach its decade sometime in the summer (I think).
 
According to my profile, I joined in September 2001.
I've posted almost every day since then, but there are still some people with way more posts than me. You must be on the FTMB all day long!
 
I did two degrees one after the other, both very heavy on research, so I HAD to be on the pooter a lot.

Yeah.

:oops:
 
gncxx said:
I was on the FTMB before this one, so technically it's over ten years old. In this incarnation, it'll reach its decade sometime in the summer (I think).
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Do you mean that there was a FTMB before 2001. There have certainly been different versions since 2001 - which have looked at worked differently - but I thought summer 2001 was the very first incarnation.

Is this supposition incorrect?

As to post-counts, I may be absent from the board for weeks at a time and then spend a few hours reading up on things I've missed and making a hell of a lot of posts to different threads.

Then there's the chat-threads that have been purged. Some of them ran (almost in parallel with IRC) in near-real-time, so one may have made dozens of short posts in quick-succession.

IJ and Emps used to be easily the most prolific posters. They commented on virtually everything that was posted.

Edit: I'm reasonably sure I visited a Fortean Times site as an undergrad (pre-2001 via Netscape Navigator!), but I don't recall a message board. You remember the 90s, of course, when it were all Men in Black, UFOs and X-Files as far as the eye could see.
 
ramonmercado said:
Escargot for starters at the banquet.
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Oi! I'm assuming you mean as guest of Honour?
 
theyithian said:
gncxx said:
I was on the FTMB before this one, so technically it's over ten years old. In this incarnation, it'll reach its decade sometime in the summer (I think).
Click to expand...

Do you mean that there was a FTMB before 2001. There have certainly been different versions since 2001 - which have looked at worked differently - but I thought summer 2001 was the very first incarnation.

Is this supposition incorrect?
Click to expand...

I've just checked out archive.org and right enough, the FTMB started in 2001! I wonder where the hell I was before that?!
 
Maybe we sould have a FTMB annivesrary party.

We could book a whole place out that's reputed to have spooks, near UFO hotspots, big cat sightings and such, just for a weekend.

There's bound to be somewhere we could shack up

A whole sceptical bunch of peeps, waiting to have their scepicism justified.

Mmm?
 
I joined 06 Aug 2002, so I was there near the first year, or at least nearer than 2003.

I know at one time, the interface was very different, and I did for a long time have an avatar for Mr R.I.N.G. from the Night Stalker show, which is what my name was originally until it was changed to work with the current format.

There were many famous battles, and the infamous "breaking of the board" that led to the creation of the Wunderkabinett and the Pandamonium Board.
 
10 Years of FTMB

Crossed my mind this morning for some reason that I recalled seeing that this MB came into being in Sept 2001 - my false memory remembered it being just weeks before 9/11.

Going into the Memberlist section to confirm this showed that I must have misremembered that fact as, according to that list, the first posters were registered on 27 July 2001.

Hence, we are fast approaching the 10th birthday of this board and as the months pass from July onwards several long-term posters will be able to raise a glass to a decade of dalliances on here.

I've still a few more years to go it seems, having passed my 8 year anniversary in March. I recall my early days, having been a reader of the mag since about 95' I think it seems I was a little late getting onboard the MB. Many an evening shift at my previous job in London was spent on here.

Something else that I find very interesting about this MB is that it allows you to test yourself in a way. There are only a few actual unexplainable to me things that I have experienced, so inevitably I have retold the stories on here across several threads. I assume others will have done the same and it is often very interesting to note how your memory of events changes when you come across a previous version of one of your experiences.

I've certainly drifted in and out of here depending on things going on with life and work but it is always nice to see a name crop up who hasn't been around for a while and sad to see ones disappear for whatever reason.

Perhaps now is the time to pass over to some of the longer-standing members, who may be able to shed light on the fabled genesis of the MB... but, somewhat fittingly, the most curious discovery I made in the Memberlist section was that the longest serving poster to have joined in Jul 2001 and still have been posting in 2011 is Alatotep - who in those near 10 years has contributed just 25 posts! :shock: :lol:
 
All up for an online celebration though - seriously - could be fun.
 
27 July is a Wednesday.

Meaning I will be at work. Meaning I am far more likely to be on here than on a weekend. :lol:
 
I joined end of July 20001, do we get gold watches for long service?
 
Ronson8 said:
I joined end of July 20001, do we get gold watches for long service?
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You don't, as you don't join for another 18,000 years... :lol:
 
theyithian said:
All up for an online celebration though - seriously - could be fun.
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Pished up sing along could be interesting. :lol:
 
Five years ago I wrote a piece to celebrate five years of the Message Board:

It is on my site, here

The promised personal blog on weird events never happened.

The tone was already slightly nostalgic but I have seen the same pattern on other sites with less weird subject matter: things bubble up, pressure builds and the thing explodes, leaving a slower process to continue that may seem to lack sparkle. It used to happen with real life groups on an even smaller time-scale.

As I recall Fortean Times had quite a popular little site from the late nineties. FT had a small regular column in one of those early Internet magazines - probably one from its own publishers! When the Message Board opened for business, I signed up quite early - several real posters got in ahead, though I suspect some of the earliest names that people dig up were ghostly entities created for testing purposes.

I am glad the idea of erasing the site and starting afresh never really caught on; browsing the old threads is an absorbing and sometimes embarrassing experience. I know I did not have the biggest library of piffle in the world but I seem to have read all the foot-notes. Here's to the next ten years! :)
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Five years ago I wrote a piece to celebrate five years of the Message Board:

It is on my site, here
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This I have never seen:

" Such was the Australian case of a photograph in which some blokes were having a few beers at the back of a house. Only around the waist of one of them, a small pair of arms was reaching! This one was widely circulated - it was picked up by the Brooke Bond Company and appeared on a series of tea cards given over to strange phenomena. People had seen it over the breakfast things as children, passed it around and been thoroughly creeped out by it! I dare say there are people now who will read this and recall it with a shudder."

Do you have a link. Not sure what I'd start trying to Google. 'Australian' 'Men' 'Arms' 'Round' 'Waist'... Concerned as to what that may throw up :lol:
 
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