Happy anniversary

[Joaz Banbeck]

It is something close to being the first anniversary of L19.

It existed in rudimentary form back in 2009; I remember signing up in December of '09 just to see what was there. Diagrams were not functional, so I didn't give it much further thought.
A few more people signed up in the first quarter of 2010, but a full month went by with no new members, so I thought that it was an interesting experiment that would slowly disappear.

Then GD had its second (third?) serious meltdown. In mid April, the refugees began streaming in. Those were heady days. We were scrambling to make the place presentable, unsure if it would all be a waste of time. GD might resurrect and everyone might go back, or the new Go Dojo might be the replacement.
But GD stayed down, at most twitching now and then. Chuck Thomas graciously decided to avoid possibly destructive competition and shut down Go Dojo.

I remember watching the signups day by day in late April, thinking that we might actually make this work. New faces showed up every minute, it seemed, and Jordus, Fwiffo, and Kirby were coding new features every hour. By May we were pushing 300 members and were clearly a viable site.

I recently looked back through the early posts, much of it was test posts and how-are-we-going-to-organize-this posts. The first meaningful threads seemed to start about April 20th. The peak signup was 58 people on April 21st. Mods were nominated on Apr 21st and 22nd. On the 25th, Don offered to send the GD database to Jordus.

That tranfer is about as formal a christening event as L19 ever got. So I propose calling April 25th the anniversary date.

[fwiffo]

I think one of the earlier dates makes more sense. The 25th was more of a closing date for GD than it was an opening date for L19.

Do you happen to know when SGFs and diagrams first got working (or at least limping)?

[daal]

We don't start counting the age of children when they take their first steps. Our first member (ArkahamKing) joined on Friday the 13th. Sounds like a good date to me.

[schultz]

You beat me to this, Joaz! I even had a reminder in my cellphone to get on and post!

Personally, I had April 20 as the day. It was around then that GD tanked again, and in a seemingly more permanent fashion. April 20th saw the influx of users registering here (it's the day I registered and finally was able to participate in this community! ). It's also the day we saw a lot of the functionality being added to the forums (diagrams, hide tags, etc.).

Looking at it a little closer, it looks like the tanking of GD sparked registrations here starting on the 18th of April, 2010. Here are the quick numbers I grabbed (users are number of users that registered on that day):

18th (5 users)
19th (3 users)
20th (22 users)
21st (60 users)
22nd (20)
23rd (28)
24th (14)
25th (30)

I've spent some time (since I apparently prefer browsing through year old forum threads rather than sleeping like a normal person) looking through the forum.

Here are the big items I could think of, or ran across, in my searching:
April 20th:
- Diagram functionality came online (viewtopic.php?p=211#p211)
- First GD Malkovich transferred and started, then put on temporary hold (viewtopic.php?f=37&t=73)
April 21st:
- (EidoGo) SGF functionality came online (viewtopic.php?p=549#p549)
April 22nd:
- Malkovich subdivisions and setup completed in the wee hours of the 22nd (viewtopic.php?p=744#p744)
- First non-GD (L19 only) Malkovich game (viewtopic.php?f=37&t=154)

So in the end you could argue for any of these range of dates. I also can't really fault daal's suggestion, but it doesn't feel quite right since ArkhamKing's registration was in Nov. 2009 and this forum really didn't start being used until April 2010.

Personally I'm going to stick with my April 20th suggestion since that's when we saw the registrations really go into high-gear. It's also the date that the diagram functionality came online, without which we probably wouldn't have these forums at all.

Just my 2 cents - and "back-breaking" research.

Regardless of the date(s), a huge thanks and shout out to all those that have made this year(+) possible and so enjoyable! Here's to you L19 Go community!