According to my profile; I’ve joined in 2002, but I swear it was in 2001.
The Big Nuke was in October 2002.
In the period leading up to the nuke, we had experienced problems with the forum which culminated in the database becoming corrupt. We were closed to new registrations and doing anything in the back end (editing posts etc) was painfully slow. It was decided that the forums would be rebuilt and the database blitzed.
The OcUK Forums were closed for a day or so and finally came back online very late in the evening of Thursday 17th October 2002 following many F5 keys being destroyed.
The mod team of the time were pre-registered to stop anyone pinching their usernames. A few members managed to register before midnight and that's why you'll see some people with a "Joined" date of 17th October 2002. We were very busy on the 18th October as the membership woke up an almost completely empty forum with just a handful of threads and very few users. We'd changed from the purple background and gun avatars to the now familiar blue background and avatars based on gangsters a few months earlier when we upgraded from vBulletin 2.0.0 to 2.2.5 so there was some familiarity but there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth because all post counts had been reset by necessity.
On the 17th October 2002 we had 91 user registrations. Of these, 14 have been online in the last month.
On the 18th October 2002 we had a massive 1,173 user registrations and of those, 157 have been online in the last month.
By the end of 2002, we'd had 2,448 people sign up to the forums and around 20% of those have been online in the last month.
Who’s the oldest normy account?
@Dr House @G-Man @Ghuraba @helmet @Ian_Eb @miller745 @[TW]Fox - These all registered on the 17th and have been online in the last month.
There's a handful more, but they were Dons or Commissarios at some time, so I'm not tagging them.
We have
just one person with an original join date of 16th October 2002
