Commissario
Today marks twenty years exactly since the "Big Nuke".
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, 26 have been online in the last month.
On the 18th October 2002 we had a massive 1,173 user registrations and of those, 258 have been online in the last month.
By the end of 2002, we'd had 2,448 people sign up to the forums and over a quarter of those have been online in the last month.
To commemorate all those damaged keyboards from back then, OcUK have kindly offered to give away a Ducky One 3 keyboard to one lucky person*. All you have to do is pick a date between 17th October 2002 and 17th October 2022 and the person who gets closest to the date we've already selected can choose a keyboard from the range here. This giveaway is only for people in the UK and to qualify, you must have made 100 posts before today. Please post the date in the format DD-MM-YYYY so that there's no ambiguity. Any other format will be ignored. If two people are equally close to the date we've chosen then the person with the best ducky pun in their post will be the winner. Entries will close at 18:00 BST on Monday 24th October 2022.
You don't have to include a duck pun in your post but you can see it will improve your chance of winning.
Were you around in those days? Are you one of those early sign ups? What are your memories of the Big Nuke and the Overclockers Forums from back then? How has your life changed between then and now? It would be nice to hear from people who have been around since the early days as well as entries to the giveaway.
* Forum mods (Admins, Dons and Underbosses), OcUK staff and OcUK vendor reps are not permitted to enter the giveaway
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, 26 have been online in the last month.
On the 18th October 2002 we had a massive 1,173 user registrations and of those, 258 have been online in the last month.
By the end of 2002, we'd had 2,448 people sign up to the forums and over a quarter of those have been online in the last month.
To commemorate all those damaged keyboards from back then, OcUK have kindly offered to give away a Ducky One 3 keyboard to one lucky person*. All you have to do is pick a date between 17th October 2002 and 17th October 2022 and the person who gets closest to the date we've already selected can choose a keyboard from the range here. This giveaway is only for people in the UK and to qualify, you must have made 100 posts before today. Please post the date in the format DD-MM-YYYY so that there's no ambiguity. Any other format will be ignored. If two people are equally close to the date we've chosen then the person with the best ducky pun in their post will be the winner. Entries will close at 18:00 BST on Monday 24th October 2022.
You don't have to include a duck pun in your post but you can see it will improve your chance of winning.
Were you around in those days? Are you one of those early sign ups? What are your memories of the Big Nuke and the Overclockers Forums from back then? How has your life changed between then and now? It would be nice to hear from people who have been around since the early days as well as entries to the giveaway.
* Forum mods (Admins, Dons and Underbosses), OcUK staff and OcUK vendor reps are not permitted to enter the giveaway
