Such interesting data. That’s when I first logged on to the Chiffboard. November 3, 2003 at 11:33am.
Excuse me…I’m just having a moment…
Happy to have that date to serve as a bit of an anchor. I remember pretty well the general condition of bewilderment that enveloped my early Chiff days, so it’s nice to have a date to put things in perspective. The timestamp, otoh, doesn’t help much but it’s interesting nonetheless.
So what is it almost…'12? oh gee.
The time seems off. Mine says 6:22am. I wouldn’t be filling out forms at 6:22am my time. At first I thought it must be Eastern time, but that would be 3:22am Pacific time, which is even more unlikely.
11:33 
our time…
you can change the offset to show you the correct time, for you, at:
User Control Panel
Board preferences
My Timezone (what should be “UTC-8” now that we’re off daylight savings)
dang Em, only been eight years! 
It’s a shame we don’t have the login time for the few older board incarnations before we ended up on phpBB 
Some of the older ones were pretty neat, allowing the direct recording of voice (or in our case, whistle playing) directly into the body of the message.
2005 for me. 6.15pm, which is local time, I suspect. Thank you for putting up with me. Wow. Six years! I feel I’ve known some of you for lots longer.
It is, isn’t it!
What were you doing for the three years it took ya to create an account here?
It’s set to that and shows the correct time on the posts, just not on the time I joined.
Not that it really matters anyway.
seems odd..
Mine is reasonable enough and they move if ya change yer time zone.
(what means they’re stored as GMT and displayed per user)
sure ya weren’t up early?
Not back in those days when I had dial-up and it took forever to do anything. Oh well. Is a puzzlement.
That reminds me … I have to start saying “DYN-O-MITE!” more often.
As in: “Wow, Emm has been here for 8 years? DYN-O-MITE!”
Or: “You’re going to X-ray my luggage? DYN-O-MITE!”
On second thought, maybe that last one isn’t such a good idea.
I have a terrible memory and really no way I can think of to recall what happened before the phpBB board. For some reason, I want to say that the board went through 2 previous web-based boards. Was it Coolboards or something like that. Rich Lafferty, of course, stepped up and offered to put together the phpBB board and, of course, hosted it for some time. I can usually find email to remind me about different things that happened after summer 2004, when I started using Gmail. I probably do have my older email on some mothballed computer around here.
The newsletters may yield a clue. I have them archived at chiffandfipple and on yahoo.com back to 2000. I’m thinking we were on something called CoolBoards or EZboards and they got bought out by yahoo.com and the board existed, maybe, for awhile as a yahoo.com thing.
Looks like it was on something called egroups.com. It’s clear that as early as 2000 there were a couple thousand members of the message board.
A note I found in a newsletter. At one time (2000), where ever the board resided, it could only display 200 messages at a time and it seems that old messages just went away…?
Reading newsletters from 2000. I say that the board is at
( http://www.sitepowerup.com/mb/view.asp?BoardID=100124 )
No memory of that whatever.
Dale
May 20, 2001
III. THE CHIFF & FIPPLE MESSAGE BOARD IS A WANDERER. A DRIFTER. A RAMBLIN’
KIND OF A THING. YOU DON’T WANT TO GET MIXED UP WITH A THING LIKE THE CHIFF &
FIPPLE MESSAGE BOARD. IT’LL JUST BREAK YOUR HEART, BABY.
As mentioned, the message board
(http://www.chiffandfipple.com/messageboard.html) has been a tremendous success.
So has coolboard.com, which has hosted the message board for about a year. A
few weeks ago, some changes were made to coolboard which message board members
didn’t like–and the service has gotten increasingly slow. So, we considered
moving to another service. I got a lot of really useful suggestions. Then, I
had a minor nervous breakdown in the face of all of the suggestions. A nasty
fist fight broke out between the advocates of different services. Riot police
were called out, I declared martial law, and then, as is my pattern, I freaked
out at the whole dilemma. Flew to my island retreat off of New Guinea, and
decided to keep the board on coolboard.com for the time being. (Several Chiff &
Fipple interns were fired over the whole deal. I mean, it was my fault and
everything, but SOMEBODY’S head had to roll.)
Well, this week, coolboard announced it is closing down shop and we have a
couple of weeks to find an alternative. Sadly, the archives of 12,000 messages
will be deleted. Poof. I’m at peace with this. All things are fleeting and
transitory. I’m thinking sand mandalas; the mighty oak silently rotting in the
forest; M.C. Hammer; “3rd Rock From the Sun.” You know, things pass. (By the
way, I’ve never actually seen “3rd Rock From the Sun.” I’m a missing anything?)
Of the options I’ve looked at to date, I’m most interested in an offer made by
an individual member of chiff & fipple to host a message board on his own
server/computer. A test is up and running and looks pretty good. This kind of
non-corporate thing appeals to me. I’m also impressed with the boards on a
service called bravenet.com. Anyway, stay tuned.
===========================================
Writing in the present day now:
Can’t find any note in the newsletter about the advent of the phpBB board. I guess the transfer from the old board to either the current one or some transitional deal must have been handled by announcements on the board.
Oh, well. I’m a little disoriented from scanning those 10 year old messages.
By the way, in 2001, I said C&F has been around for 5 years.
Dale
I got the newsletter long before I joined the board. Now I have to post this to see when it was I joined
The truly unstable own island yachts. What a junior.
Having a bit of a ‘senior moment’ too
I remember Coolboard…