Look Back at Eleven Years of Forum Milestones (January 3, 2011)

[ChrisReid]

The modern incarnation of the CIC Forums turns eleven years old today! While the Y2K bug left most of the world unharmed, it did a number on our ancient 20th Century message boards, which had to be rebuilt from scratch. We lost thousands of great threads about Secret Ops, Prophecy Gold, False Colors and the Wing Commander Movie, but the good news is that our posters have bounced back with nearly 25,000 new threads and more than 360,000 posts since.

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Here's a brief history of major milestones over the last decade:

• January 3, 2000 - New boards created to fix Y2K incompatibility
  
• Late 2000 - We switched from Ultimate BulletinBoard to vBulletin and gave the forums their own domain at Crius.net as a tribute to Privateer 2. This also allowed us to deal with hosting limitations of the day and spawned SolSector.net.
• August 11, 2001 - Customizable color layouts first became available.
• July 4, 2002 - The Off Topic Forum first opened, which was a controversial decision at the time! The idea that communities would form around a particular thing and then might want to discuss other subjects was a relatively new concept. In the message board equivalents on the Internet of the 1990s, posting off topic material was frowned upon.
• February 2003 - We held a logo contest, and Filler's winning entry still graces the top of the boards.
• July 2004 - The new [Discuss] link provided people a jumping off point to talk about front page news posts in the new News Discussion Forum.
• August 11, 2005 - Years before your friends filled your Facebook inbox with annoying Farmville and Mafia Wars invites, the CIC Forums Arcade added mini games and scoreboards (which were quietly deactivated a couple years later).
• February/March 2007 - The Forums were upgraded to accept XBox Live Gamertag inputs, and the board for the upcoming Wing Commander Arena displayed XBox Live info right next to your name.
• June 9, 2007 - A Squadron feature was activated to allow people to form groups around their Crius.net identity. This feature was set up for Arena, and was also intended for Prophecy multiplayer matchups.
• January 4, 2009 - A Feedback Forum was set up to allow people to more easily provide site feedback and comments.
• August 29, 2010 - Our first mobile plugin made it easier to post from cell phones. There'll certainly be more to come on this in the future.

And you can still find references to the Wing Commander Chat Zone throughout Crius.net, which was a name borrowed from Origin's original web board in the 1990s. Head on over now and ask, comment and reply away!

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Original update published on January 3, 2011

 

[Dundradal]

It has been a great 11 years here at the CZ!

 

[Wedge009]

I only really started visiting the forums regularly during 2000, so alas, I don't know what things were like before then. I find it hard to believe that the Y2K bug did all that, though. Do you recall the technical details of what happened?

I do remember the original Chat Zone name, though.

Wow, really? Crius.net and SolSector.net were way back in 2000?

Heh, about the Off-Topic Forum, I remember all the complaints about topic drift in threads (that is, to topics completely unrelated to WC). I know, because I'm pretty sure I was one of those people who didn't like it.

Ah, Filler. Is he still around?

Hmm, I actually don't remember the mini-games. Maybe that's because I didn't manage to play them.

It's been a mostly pleasant 11 years, all things considered, despite the odd nit-wit that comes through every now and then.

 

[ChrisReid]

There were a couple of board iterations. The very first was a super old fashioned wwwboard, and I believe Hadrian got us set up on ultimate bulletin board at some point between the Movie and Y2K, and it just wasn't set up right to handle the bug. The main database got corrupted and we started over. To this day, it's one of Kris' great regrets that we didn't save that (it wouldn't have been a whole lot.. just a year or so more of UBB, since the wwwboard stuff was just deleted when it got too long/big/old, which sounds incredible now). Kris still talks about how he probably could have saved some of the data were it to happen today, and he can probably go into more of the technical detail.

Crius.net was fall of 2000 and Solsector was fall of 2001. Back at the time, the limitations on how much traffic a site could handle were such that it made more sense for us to found three different domains/accounts. We've long since merged them back onto the same machine. It's something of an ongoing debate as to whether the Forums should go back to wcnews.com/forums (they were previously at wcnews.com/zone.shtml). There's a certain symbolic meaning to both having them on the main domain and on the Crius domain, although integrating them back into wcnews.com would probably benefit our rankings in Google. If we do it, it's probably best to do it before the next big WC game hits.

Many people have mentioned other big milestones and memories from the Forums. There's lots of spiritual predecessors back to 1996 or so if you're counting WCHS, the Origin WCCZ or the agwc Newsgroup too, so if anyone remembers something else, don't hesitate to mention it here.

 

[Wedge009]

'tis a shame either way, but no use going over the what-ifs. Just have to accept what's gone is gone.

Northern hemisphere autumn would be... lemme think... third quarter? The board says I joined in August, so some time after that, I'm guessing.

I haven't heard of that debate - is that just in-staff? I actually like having crius.net, but search engine rankings is something I didn't consider. Would it be possible to have wcnews.com/forums/ and crius.net/ point to the same location? Or would that just upset the search engines?

I do remember talk about the old newsgroups, too. I've been pretty underprivileged, I only received regular Internet access in 2000, so I have little idea of the going-ons of the 1990s Internet.

 

[Jason_Ryock]

I think the most significant thing was when you made it so that we could view posts in the oldest first model instead of the newest at the top model...I'm surprised that didn't make it on the list.

I didn't know about that Squadron thing for WCP and Arena, is that still active somewhere?

 

[Dundradal]

Squadron Page

Front page story

 

[ChrisReid]

I think the most significant thing was when you made it so that we could view posts in the oldest first model instead of the newest at the top model...I'm surprised that didn't make it on the list.

I don't remember that as much of a thing. I seem to recall it was a temporary experiment that we tried for a little bit, because I think even '90s boards read mostly similar to the current format.

 

[LeHah]

I suddenly feel very, very old.

 

[AD]

I do read the threads all backwards... If I didn't visit the CZ regularly then I guess I'd want it the other way, but I like that I can click on threads that have many posts and automatically see the latest additions up at the the top. Some of the other "newest post" buttons and whatnot make it redundant I guess but I guess I'm stuck in the past.

 

[Wedge009]

I think the most significant thing was when you made it so that we could view posts in the oldest first model instead of the newest at the top model...

I'm with AD on this: because of the CZ's default layout, I also prefer having newest posts first (instead of having to wade through all the old stuff), and have that in my personal settings in the current forum system. And then get slightly miffed at people who say things like 'see the earlier post above'...

 

[ChrisReid]

I'm with AD on this: because of the CZ's default layout, I also prefer having newest posts first (instead of having to wade through all the old stuff), and have that in my personal settings in the current forum system.

It's a good option to have people be able to select, but nobody has to wade through old posts anymore. When you come to the forums, you can click "New Posts" to see every thread with new posts within the last 10 days. You click on the thread you want, and then click the "View First Unread" button and it takes you immediately to the first post that you haven't seen before.

And then get slightly miffed at people who say things like 'see the earlier post above'...

Well, being from Australia, you should be used to having to hold up everything anyone else on the Internet says to a mirror. But to me it's always felt more natural to have the new posts below. You read the sentences/paragraphs within a post from top to bottom, so it just seems more logical to keep proceeding downwards for newer text.

 

[Wedge009]

Like AD said, maybe it's just a case of being stuck in the past. Old habits and all that.

I wasn't being wholly serious about the posts above/below thing...

 

[AD]

Like AD said, maybe it's just a case of being stuck in the past. Old habits and all that.

Back in the day when we did crappy basic html in computer science class in highschool we we're supposed to aim at making every webpage readable without needing to scroll down. So to some degree my preference comes from that philosophy of web design.

Second, I also use the "new thread" button almost exclusively, which means that reading through a long thread in 'normal' order means I have to scroll all the way back up to the top (partly because I also set my preferences to display every post of a thread on a single page. I find it more efficient in reverse. I get that I can just use the 'go to first unread post' button, but I enjoy that I have the option to do it my own way.

 

[KrisV]

There were a couple of board iterations. The very first was a super old fashioned wwwboard, and I believe Hadrian got us set up on ultimate bulletin board at some point between the Movie and Y2K, and it just wasn't set up right to handle the bug. The main database got corrupted and we started over. To this day, it's one of Kris' great regrets that we didn't save that (it wouldn't have been a whole lot.. just a year or so more of UBB, since the wwwboard stuff was just deleted when it got too long/big/old, which sounds incredible now). Kris still talks about how he probably could have saved some of the data were it to happen today, and he can probably go into more of the technical detail.

This was a few years before PHP and MySQL took off. Web development involved Perl scripts and flat files for your data. UBB kept a separate file for each thread, adding new posts to either the top or the bottom. I think it couldn't figure out what to do with posts from the year 19100 and a bunch of those files got messed up. The details are very hazy, but at the time it seemed like the board was total loss. No one had the technical skill to patch it up.

Crius.net was fall of 2000 and Solsector was fall of 2001. Back at the time, the limitations on how much traffic a site could handle were such that it made more sense for us to found three different domains/accounts.

Back in 2000 we were pushing 12 gigs of data each month, and six or eight gigs of data transfer was about the most you could affordably get from a reliable hosting company. Disk space would have been a hundred megabytes at best. If you needed more, you had to get a dedicated server somewhere (typically a Cobalt RAQ3) and that was way too expensive. After a brief and horrible experience with CI Host, we decided to split the forums off from the main site and get two smaller hosting packages from a decent company. At the time, the forums took up nearly half our resource usage, so this made a lot of sense.

I haven't heard of that debate - is that just in-staff? I actually like having crius.net, but search engine rankings is something I didn't consider. Would it be possible to have wcnews.com/forums/ and crius.net/ point to the same location? Or would that just upset the search engines?

Technically possible, but there would be complications when linking between threads, page rank would be hurt, and the board's software license doesn't allow it.

It's a good option to have people be able to select, but nobody has to wade through old posts anymore. When you come to the forums, you can click "New Posts" to see every thread with new posts within the last 10 days. You click on the thread you want, and then click the "View First Unread" button and it takes you immediately to the first post that you haven't seen before.

This kind of feature didn't exist at the time. We ended up saving a good amount of data transfer by putting new posts first. Since we were always maxing out our allowance and paying overage fees, this was a pretty big deal.