I would love to be able to see everyone’s actual “joined” date - is there any way that you can pull that data for the profiles? I was able to find my first welcome letter, but I imagine those that have been members for over 20 years would not.
Just would be nice to see who had been members longer than when the site was redesigned. Figured a database sweep of the archives (I assume its database driven) would get the first emails of the members. Might not be 100% accurate since some folks might have been members for years before they ever decided to post, but still would be nice to see I would imagine.
Unless that is already something that is in existence and I just do not know where to look for it?
@AlyssaKay - We have the information for some members but not for others I believe. We created the database from 250,000+ emails on the old mailing list. That DB was used to “reconstruct” a forum as if it had been in existence all that time (or at least, as close as we could get). There were a number of different ways over many years that people’s information was collected, people changed emails multiple times, etc etc.
I will talk to @leah-ganoksin-admin about this… it would be cool to have it for at least the people we do have the information on, but I am fearful it might be a LOT of manual work. I’ll keep you posted on this.
Hello Seth
It seems to me that each of us could determine our beginning date by searching the archives. Have not tried it. Just seems a logical way to find the first email of welcome. Your thoughts?
Judy in Kansas where the University’s football game was a win. Yay!
I just searched the archives and my welcome post is listed as July 1997.
While this is close, I believe that I joined about 6 months earlier than that, either late 1996 or early 1997.
At any rate, I have been an Orchid member for just under 20 years
Hi @Judy_in_Kansas - for some people that works beautifully. However, the issues with doing it “globally” (meaning, trying to do it for all members using a script or other automated method - at least as I recall from a couple of months ago when @leah-ganoksin-admin and I discussed this) were these;
The “introduction” emails were done for some people who signed up in certain ways, at certain times - it wasn’t consistent across the entire history of the forum.
Many, many people had two or three email addresses during their tenure as Orchid members. To the computer, those look like different members. Others joined, left, re-joined, changed names, etc.
One thing to keep in mind - we took 258,000 individual Orchid “posts” that were basically emails, and wrote a whole bunch of software to move them over into a threaded, searchable forum format. The idea was to try and make it look and work like the forum had been in existence this whole time. Of course, any time you try to take emails and turn them into something they weren’t originally formatted to be, you have issues.
My hope is over time, most of that stuff will get corrected, old posts will be “revived” and brought current (which is already happening - that’s really cool), etc.
Sorry for the digression - in any event, I do think it would be very, very cool to be able to see when people joined, especially because we have many hundreds of people (of the many thousands) who have literally been here for over 2 decades. Not a lot of internet forums can say that!
I’m adding this to my list of “cool stuff we need to figure out how to do in an intelligent way” – @leah-ganoksin-admin and I will figure this out at some point. It’s worth doing.
First up though - we are working on a re-design of all the content categories on Ganoksin.com and a whole bunch of categorization work, that is going to make everything easier to find.
I think I joined in 1997 or 1998. I lurked for years though.