I'd guess this has been done before...

As an occasional poster, my idle curiosity got the best of me and I thought I might just do a search on prolific ToSeek's first post.

In the process, I got a 11,990 returned postings. Can this be possible? Thus I half-expected his first post would have something to do with a misplaced teddy bear or soother that wasn't tasting so good. But no, the first recorded post is from October 23, 2001. (I see JayUtah's first post at October 30, 2001. So I assume thereabouts is when Bad Astronomy first started. Anybody know who was the very first (besides BA) to register a post?) All I can think of is that ToSeek must have a laptop in his bathtub or as an implant.

Anyway, ToSeek's first post (as best I can tell), appropriately beginning with "Just to start things off..." in a topic entitled "Enterprise":


http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/vi...;highlight=#17

Keep up the good work.

RBG (266)

hard to say... there was another type of message board originally. i can't even remember how long i've been following this board (only recently have i been active, however). it seems like BA was actually around before 2001 and that may be the time the new board went into affect. in other words, toseek and jay were members before then, on the old boards. am i right guys?

taks

Some things I think I think (apologies to Phil Musick, who nobody here has probably ever heard of):
- as you've guessed, the very first post was here.

- The aforementioned ToSeek post is post 17 (sort of), based on its url

- The BA's post is post 3 --- so something happened to posts one and two.

- The first non-BA post (based on url) was by Hook. I guess he/she didn't like it here. (4 posts total)

- There seems to have been an old board, based on the BA's post, whose posts are gone. I suppose there are web-ways to search for such old posts.

- Finally, at least one member (Colt) has a joined date (inexplicably) of 1969. I don't think anyone (BA included) knows how that happened.

the old board was a thread type system. i.e. you could see entire threads, including all replies, and there were no topics that i recall. as we got busy, it was next to impossible to keep up discussions.

taks

Colt apparently was able to find a way to hack his join date.

I was actually the first to register on the new board after Phil opened it for "preview". I expected to be removed and asked to rejoin after the "official" opening, but that didn't happen. So except for that cheater Colt, I'm still the first in war, first in peace, and first on the new BABB (except for the BA himself, of course) :wink:

I don't think Colt hacked his join date - the time just got set to 0, which in the Unix standard translates to the join date he now has.

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Voila!

HUb', John Kierein, GoW/kilopi/etc., and I are all here. Can you find us?

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The oldest version of the board I can find in the archive is here.

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Ahem. :-"

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Also, I must make an obvious correction. While a search under "ToSeek" returned for me 11,990 hits, his official counter shows 13,264 posts. Don't know why the discrepancy.

RBG

Hey, that post tells me that just a few more messages by me and I'll be a Bad PhD at 301 posts. Ha. I wonder if anyone was "grandfathered" under that original arrangement?

RBG

Maybe the counter includes the previous incarnation of BA? Or the Search function is not absolute?

RBG

Phil recently cleared out some of the old threads from BABBling, because they were taking a large amount of space in the database. So some of the messages that were posted no longer exist on the board to find. Post counts, however, were unaffected by the pruning, and so reflect the total number of posts a given member has made, even if some were later removed.

So the original BABB was a mailing list that got archived?

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Yes, notice he has a join date of December 31, 1969. The Unix dates started on January 1, 1970 as 0. I think because of time zone adjustments, his date got set to December 31, 1969.

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That partially answers a question I meant to ask re such things: Is there this unconsumable amount of hard drive space somewhere which can hold unlimited numbers of archived posts? I wonder what such a thing costs?

RBG

Or, it was set to -1?

i always thought Unix date start was 1970, not 1969...

taks

The BA could have done it himself as a joke.

It would be quite easy to fix...

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At profile display-time GMT or earlier, Colt's join-date is Dec 31, 1969. At GMT+1 or later, Colt's join-date is Jan 1, 1970.

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0....