Five years today in 2007 the VilliersTerrace Forum was born. I've always like the stories of how things came to be. Here is the brief rambling history...
The Bunnymen Official Forum or the BOF as we began calling it, crashed for what seemed like the 5th time in a year. This time it was down for an extended period of time. I was doing a lot of free lance web design at the time and I already had the VilliersTerrace discography site so I figured I'd install a little forum and send an e-mail out to the Seven Seas Mailing list and a few other folks I knew from the Bunnymen world.
People started posting and I fully expected it to die once the BOF returned. The BOF did return but many people stayed. At first we got along like a big happy family with the BOF and I even received some nice welcoming e-mails and they linked to my site. Over time that soured as I was asked to police the topics here at VT in the same manner as the BOF. I refused to do that as I thought this should be a place to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly and quite frankly I just didn't want to moderate a forum that much. As a consequence they removed my site from their links. No hard feelings, most of my traffic seemed to come from Google searches anyway.
And here we are still 5 years later. People have come and gone from here. Facebook has taken the place of the BOF and things have slowed down here as well but I think we can all agree, it's not the same Bunnymen even from 5 years ago either. At any rate, thanks everyone for coming here and having a good time. I've met some fine people, virtually and in person as a result of this place and I hope some of you have too.
I think my favorite moment was the interview we did in 2008 with Noel Burke with the forum member submitted questions. Here it is if you didn't know about it.
Here are some items from my stats page:
Forum started: 18 Oct 2007 07:20 am
Number of posts: 73,025
Posts per day: 39.98
Number of topics: 4173
Topics per day: 2.28
Number of users: 851
Most Users Ever Online: 77 (this was during the Radio City Music Hall meetup)
First user to sign up: Red (we had 15 other users sign up the first day)
Top poster: black francis with 9344 posts
Most Active Topic: The Obligatory Depeche Mode thread with 1336 replies
Most active poll: Who or What is Crystal89? with 778 votes
Least interesting topic: Transgendered female in Miss Universe pageant (based on a ratio of replies and views)
Oh and I'd be much obliged if you folks would shop at Amazon via my links so I get the kickback. It helps defray the hosting costs.
Thanks!