History of this forum

General discussion for all topics related to DOS, Windows, Linux, consoles, etc. Anything to do with games.
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Wally
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History of this forum

Post by Wally »

Ok this is to remember the past of this forum (before spamming and smiley faced guests existed :huh: )

I remember when we were debating over this forum for a name such as 'GLERFS and Kazer'os the cancer causing cereal'

If anyone has any other memories share them :)
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Cakephatt
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Post by Cakephatt »

GLERFS?
YOU ARE ALL MY SLAVES! NOW DO AS I SAY AND DRINK THE KOOL - AID
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Wally
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Post by Wally »

Cakephatt if you did a bit of searching it might help
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wardrich
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Post by wardrich »

how about that great mod named "wardrich" who disappeared one day? :P
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Wally
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Post by Wally »

Yeah true. :laugh:
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Kazer0
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Post by Kazer0 »

How about the year before wally came, or the 5 years before that?
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Post by Dogbreath »

Kazer0 wrote:How about the year before wally came, or the 5 years before that?
Sure.

The host website, www.dosgames.com, was started in the January of 1999. For the next 2 years, it had a series of rather... bad, small message boards that were eventually replaced by a 4 forum UBB board, which became moderately popular. This was the state of things when I started posting May 4th, 2001. (Yes, I've been here 4 years)

This board lasted until around October/November of 2001, when it died and Emmzee replaced it with a new board users here have affectionately titled the Ghetto Board. It was pretty much a website version of Usenet, with the technological sophistication that implies. (None whatsoever) Da_Goat still insists this model was far superior to our current system.

The only members of that board that are registered here are myself, Thunderdog, Da_Goat, Jean, Nanobot, and Kazer0. (Though Kazer0 and Nanobot only made a couple of posts)

After we realized just how insecure that model of board was, a new board was created June 1st, 2002. This board lasted 3 months, but drew over 100 members, most of them the "oldbies" of the current board, such as NPS, Moo, Lakerzz8, Wardrich, Oz, Winger, Ally, 486 Player, and Meh (The ol' Warez peddler). There are probably a couple more I've forgotten. This is also when I became an admin/mod for the board.

Anyway, this board (IBB) ended up being hopelessly buggy, so we updated to phpBB in September. This forum works well, and has remained our forum software since then.

Early in 2003 I overhauled the forum structure, which is essentially the one we have now, plus or minus a couple of forums. (Notably Game Reviews, Game Exchange, Game Creation, and Forum Games, which have either been deleted or will be shut down soon)

This was followed by the addition of a second website to the forum, dosgamesarchive.com. Later in the year, a third website, dosgamesonline.com joined.

Since then, things have been more or less the same, barring a server change or two and a couple upgrades. We've gone from 10 (active) members to nearly 1000, though there've probably only been 150-200 that I actually remember.

Another member will have to fill in for the histories of dosgames archive and dosgames online before we merged histories, and I have no recollection of their respective forums.
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Post by John The Ax »

And no one remembers me. But, hey, I guess I'm not a memorable person. You know, it made me feel old when I was looking through the logo archive and remembered the old '99 one. Six years ago... Long time. I remember when I first came to these forums. I had never actually been on a message board, as a user, before. MZ made an announcement in the update about the new message boards, and it drew me (and quite a few others, it seems) there. I think I joined on the second day it was around. Quickly, though, I became an active member, and when mods were necessary, I became one, mostly because I loved the forums and wanted to see them in good health. Ikonboard lasted, what, a year and a half? Then we switched over to PHP, which I must admit I like a lot better. I mostly hang out on GFAQs now, on the PnP and Classicgaming boards, but who knows? Maybe I'll return to carry on the torch. It seems so odd to me for Wally to make this topic - I remember him as a complete newbie. Times change...
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Post by Dogbreath »

John The Ax wrote:Ikonboard lasted, what, a year and a half?
Give or take 15 months. ;) (Ikonboard lasted for a grand total of 106 days)
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Post by emmzee »

Good to see ya back JtA ;) Yea Ikonboard was just too buggy ... phpBB has been less so, although rather insecure:

One of the reasons for the recent server change (the straw that broke the camel's back, if you will) was due, in part, to a security flaw in phpBB. The other part was due to the old version of PHP on the old server, which according to my old host could not be upgraded without breaking lots of stuff. So it goes with an ancient RAQ system I suppose. Anyways, after learning about the security flaw, I quickly patched the dosgames.com forum ... however, I forgot about another copy of phpBB I installed for a friend's club years ago. Unfortuantely hackers (or, rather, automated programs using Google to find vulnerable forums) were able to break into the server thru that installation of the forum and gain access to the server. I noticed the intrusion on Dec 24 2004 ... good timing, that. :rolleyes: I was able to stop the script-kiddie-ish intrusion programs, but that event, combined with the always overloaded RAQ4 server forced me to switch hosts to a new P4 system. Thankfully there's been no problems so far with the new server, or recent versions of phpBB. :thumbsup:
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Kazer0
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Post by Kazer0 »

Wally, sorry to say you missed the good days of this forum. 2002-Jan 2003 was the best. The olden "lets insult people" days were good as well.
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Post by Dogbreath »

Kazer0 wrote:Wally, sorry to say you missed the good days of this forum. 2002-Jan 2003 was the best. The olden "lets insult people" days were good as well.
:laugh:

Back in the olden days, when I was neigh fourteen years of age, great things were afoot...

JTA and I were talking about this on AIM last night. Forum life resembles real life, but when in real life generations pass every 25 years, on forums it takes 2 or 3. This seems consistent with almost every forum I've been to, at least forums populated and run by people under 21. In 6 years, this forum has had 4 generations, with the fourth (I'll dub it the Wallyesque) finally starting to take shape. As with human generations, each thinks of the former as being inferior/less glorious and creative.

This is partly because it's true - without exterior input all energy dissipates, and partly because each generation has specific collective memories that will never be repeated in the next. So what one generation defines as perfection, the next will scoff at. (There'll never be another Woodstock. There'll never be another Canadian invasion thread. Carpe Diem)

As I said, forum time runs at a different rate than real time. For instance, I don't associate threads posted on the forum with events in my real life. From a subjective standpoint, the entire life of the forum could've happened last week, and I wouldn't know the difference. (And vice-versa) This could be used as a social studies research. 10 years of forum history could be equivalent to 200 in human. Not in actual ideas or people or life or death, but in ideological progressions and politics. The past 4 years could represent the last 60 in human development, or at least parallel it. (For instance, maybe we're only at the political sophistication of ancient Rome, I don't know)

And yes, I realize that this is somewhat ridiculous, as all it the forum amounts to is the ramblings of about 150 young males over the period of 4 years, but human nature works the same regardless of the circumstances in which it's analyzed.

One thing I do know is that the driving force for human progress is the creation of new ideas. Normally, this isn't a problem. The old generation dies, and the new one is free of the past, and free to think up new ones. 99% of the time these ideas will either fail, or only match those of the old. But occassionally, progress is made, and civilization becomes more sophisticated. On "forum life", since generations are so greatly accelerated, this becomes a problem. Remanents of the Old Generation stay around (too young to die) and suppress the ideas of the new.

This is why I'm interested in hearing the forum history from Wally's point of view. Partly because I believe the key component to social change is the unleashing of creative energy, and partly because I'm a human relations freak who gets kicks out of weird shit like this.
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Wally
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Post by Wally »

Well i was a moron in the time. Not much more i can say :shame:

WB John The Axe anyway. Its nice to see another friendly face here again.
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Post by Joris »

Dogbreath wrote:Another member will have to fill in for the histories of dosgames archive and dosgames online before we merged histories, and I have no recollection of their respective forums.
Dosgamesonline.com never had a forum before we joined the forum over here. Actually, dosgamesonline.com was really crappy before Darren started hosting the website. He also learnt me a bit PHP, which is much easier then ASP, which we used before March 2004. Also we had just 50 visitors per day when Darren started hosting dosgamesonline.com, at the moment we have around 2000 uniques per day... but I guess that's the history of dosgamesonline.com and not the history of this forum. Nice to read the history of DGF though ;)
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Post by Ro@m »

Thats a good owerwiev of the history Dogbreath.
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