A long time ago, in a land far far away...
I bought my first UBB in Sept-Oct '99 after reading a story about it in INC. Magazine about someone touting how good it was for site "community" - the catchword of the day at the time. My favorite site glassdog had just installed one too... so it sounded like a good idea for my stand318 site. It was 3 months before I even installed it and opened it to the public.
I read the first couple of posts at SK about a new "hacking" site going up in early January, but wasn't interested at the time because a) I figured they wouldn't last long after IP found out about it...
and b) I could barely set my ubb up, let alone make changes to all that code that I couldn't make head or tails out of... When they were still open in February, I began visiting, wanting to learn how to do some of that cool stuff.
In March I signed up and installed my first "hack" - "welcome last user to register" - very difficult at the time...
But after reading countless hours of cal's, charles', ilya's, etc. posts, it began to make sense.
In early May, the above people had had enough with the current owner of ubb chh, someone who even preferred to call himself "Spaz" - that should tell you something about him, I'm sure. They split and formed ubbcodehackers. In their wake, spaz's friend "slick chicken" (we had all the strange people at that time
) joined as an admin. To this day no-one knows who slick chicken was or where he was from - I
still think he worked for the web host we were with. Anyways, I offered to moderate some forums since by then I was on all the time and slick was desperate enough to say yes... By June it was apparent that slick knew even less than I did, spaz had started becoming scarce, and in the rotation of people slick was letting be admin, I jumped in the fray and joined up. And the rest is history...
Digital Boy was asked to become a moderator around that time, because, frankly at the time, he was the only one who actually wrote any new modifications.
Our web host began requiring us to display
ugly banner ads for them, as a result of some shady deal between spaz and them. Spaz had disappeared, and slick chicken was running around, well, like his head was cut off. (I liked to call him "chicken little" - mainly cuz he liked to about once a week make a hurried announcement in the private forums that he "had 'suspicions' that we were about to be hacked, so everyone change their password pronto!". Spaz showed up often enough to add fuel to the fire. heheh
June of that summer someone who always seemed to have an encouraging word, never complained, helped
wherever she could was asked to join us as moderator. Deb has been instrumental in our success ever since.
Late July, DB and I had enough of the crap (is that better Greg? I said crap ;)), slick was disappearing for weeks at a time, and the banners were getting uglier. DB was promoted to admin, and we plotted our escape.
We wanted to bring more professionalism to the site, to the staff, everything. So, we bought the ubbdev name to remove the word "hacking" from our name, built the site, and moved in the dawn hours of Labor Day weekend 2000.
Sept 12th , Deb joined us as an admin, mainly for the things she brought to our admin staff as a whole - class, professionalism, and hygiene. She had spent many hours assisting us with the build-up to launching the new site and has been instrumental in our developing other areas such as our nice graphics database that other forum sites keep taking graphics from, we know who you are...
They can give you their background and correct some of my mistakes in memory recall up there, I have probably said more than you wanted to know anyways...
