TK History

[Parallaxis]

If anyone's interested, I was going through GrandTheftCow's TK ezboard archive and I noticed a few things...

• TK's founding date appears to be June 16, 2001. That's when Red Whacker created his account.
• IJD GAF joins Jun 16, 2001. Most likely the second person to join TK.
• RobL joined and made his account on June 28, 2001.
• Sardonica joined July 2, 2001.
• I joined sometime on or before July 6, 2001.
• Che Guevara Forever joined Aug 2, 2001.
• Feb 1 , 2002 - IJD GAF quits and Sardonica is promoted to admin.
• Feb 11, 2002 - MissManners becomes TK's financial backer and removes all ads. She becomes an admin in return.
• Feb 12, 2002 - Sardy demods all the mods since they're no longer needed in a "censorship-free environment."
• July 5, 2002 (apx) - Christian decides to start banning all TK members off TrekBBS (except for IJD GAF, because he really wasn't that important.) Captain Decker and I were the first to get the ax.
• Aug 2002 may have been when the .com board was made.

*Back on ezboard you could have a local account just for that forum or a global account for all ezboard forums. My first account ("The Host") was local and it's profile page has been lost to time. The earliest post I could find for me in the archive was July 6.

*Red Whacker credits IJD GAF as the 3rd founder alongside himself and RobL. That's kind of debatable since IJD GAF never had a really big presence. I guess he did have admin powers though according to Red. To my knowledge he never used them, or at least he never used them for anything important. To be honest, Rob was the only real admin after the first 2 weeks, until Sardy and MissManners came along.

 

[Parallaxis]

The Ezboard (about 1 year in...)

Troll Kingdom @ www.ezboard.com

TROLL KINGDOM -- A Censorship-Free Place to Discuss Science Fiction, Life, and to engage in Flame wars and controversial, off-color conversation without repurcussion... (Trolls = Survivors of Other BBS Witch Hunts)

web.archive.org

I had already been demodded by RobL. The header image is different from the original (this one designed by MissManners?) I made the original banners and had been hosting them, but changed them out to something stupid to troll TK into thinking they had been hacked. The green outline around the forums was something I designed for my ezboard, Dark Kingdom. Rob liked it so I gave him the code to add it to TK as well. That was back when Rob and I were the only active posters on TK, not long after it opened. I don't remember what caused us to get popular again. It might have been the leaks of the Trekbbs mod forum.

Orb Hall @ www.ezboard.com

The home of the Celestial Orbs.

web.archive.org

Orb Hall. A fellow ezboard used by TrekBBS members. Orb Hall is still rocking TK's original "planetary" background image.

 

[Volpone]

This is all in the BV era. If I may, I'll chip in on how I wound up here.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

Paramount had just finished "Voyager" and their next 'Trek series was going to be a prequel. I thought this was a great idea because it could explain a lot of how the Federation wound up the way it was. Have a lot of "The Right Stuff" macho bullshit dumb cowboy diplomacy mistakes, where the UESPA are genuinely trying to make things better for the dirty backwards aliens and screw things up terribly. Have interestingly basic but still noticeably Star Trek technology. Do some cool Romulan War stuff. Turns out it is surprisingly difficult to just e-mail Paramount. So I wound up joining their BBS. If you haven't been, it's terrible. Or it was. Hopefully it has died by now. But it got a bug started. So I wound up at Dennis Bailey's board "Starscape"? and also TBBS. I was on TBBS during the Iraq War. But it had already started to suck. So by 2005 I dipped my toes into WF. It was pretty dead in those days. But it picked up and got pretty awesome. Then things happened and by 2007 or so it had jumped the shark and was on the downward slope. During that time I tried various other options--along with this place. In the end, long story short, I decided this was the place I hated least and TK moved into its AD era.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

I had access to the EZBoard thanks to knowing Sardy in real life (we worked in the same office for years) and by having a close online relationship with BlazerBoy. Sardy was the one who introduced me to TBBS in 2000. Several of the spinoff boards came about when more and more of us TBBSers who had fun in the Misc forum and the Lounges were being promoted from Fleet Captain to Commodore, and kicked from one lounge to the other.

TK intrigued me, but their fights weren't really my fights, so I gravitated toward the Mine Field, and ended up being more proactively involved in EFCL and LoNAF when they opened. When TK & EFCL got their own .com's and left EZ, it was exciting. I cautiously had fun on TK, but I started learning the ropes of modding/adminning/running a board on EFCL & LoNAF.

Then Verteron took down EFCL and stored it in his closet, and my attempt with Mogh & BobbyT to start/run rEFCL only lasted a few years. (I have a different board of my own now, which is basically a backup place for Mine Fielders to post). LoNAF just slowly faded away.

I tried Wordforge a few times over the years, but I was always on the outside looking in there; I missed all the in-jokes. I remember a cool board called Random Outlet that was fun for a brief time, was it Twain who ran that? Along the way there was also Shattered Corpse, Haven, Frumious Bandersnatch...

I never thought in a million years I'd end up an admin here, but logically it makes sense; I'm one of the few people still around who was never part of anyone's wars, and I'm not a vindictive or petty person in general, so I could be trusted with the controls, lol. For me, this board has been the longest constant throughout the whole TBBS ancestry tree. And it's still all about dat Spam...

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

(Holy shit my WF login still works lol... I only made 2 or 3 posts with it, many years ago... oh well)

 

[CaptainWacky]

• Aug 2002 may have been when the .com board was made.

The .com was originally going to launch on September 11th 2002. A few people said this was in poor taste (poor taste? ON TK!?) and Sardy instead just posted a 9/11 memorial image on the original launch date. The board appeared on I thnk the 13th of September (my registration date is the next day.)

 

[Colonel Kira's Left Tit]

I very much remember Red Whacker slowly disassembling the EZBoard that night. It was kind of hilarious.

 

[StarMan™]

I remember a cool board called Random Outlet that was fun for a brief time, was it Twain who ran that?

Oh yeah. Twain did start a something up, though it was short-lived IIRC. Was it green? I made a couple of posts there.

 

[StarMan™]

The Ezboard (about 1 year in...)

Troll Kingdom @ www.ezboard.com

TROLL KINGDOM -- A Censorship-Free Place to Discuss Science Fiction, Life, and to engage in Flame wars and controversial, off-color conversation without repurcussion... (Trolls = Survivors of Other BBS Witch Hunts)

web.archive.org

I had already been demodded by RobL. The header image is different from the original (this one designed by MissManners?) I made the original banners and had been hosting them, but changed them out to something stupid to troll TK into thinking they had been hacked. The green outline around the forums was something I designed for my ezboard, Dark Kingdom. Rob liked it so I gave him the code to add it to TK as well. That was back when Rob and I were the only active posters on TK, not long after it opened. I don't remember what caused us to get popular again. It might have been the leaks of the Trekbbs mod forum.

Orb Hall @ www.ezboard.com

The home of the Celestial Orbs.

web.archive.org

Orb Hall. A fellow ezboard used by TrekBBS members. Orb Hall is still rocking TK's original "planetary" background image.

Damn.

My quest, huh. Here we are - 22 years later and that abomination still stands.

My task is not done, Che. I let you all down.

 

[Parallaxis]

Damn.

My quest, huh. Here we are - 22 years later and that abomination still stands.

My task is not done, Che. I let you all down.

There are only 72 people online at TrekBBS right now. I don't remember the numbers from the old days, but I feel like Wordforge and Slipstream Underground both had at least 50 members online during their busiest moments. So TrekBBS numbers are getting dangerously close to mid-2000s spin-off board numbers. And that's with like 4 new Star Trek shows currently airing. By contrast, the Star Trek sub-reddit has 1,800 people currently online.

So it seems TrekBBS killed itself, which most people predicted would happen 20 years ago. I don't think most people would imagine that it would take 30 years, but they got there in the end. I've tried to post over there but something about the format is just off putting. The colors are kind of meh and the 1,000 posts megathreads are ridiculous.

 

[jack]

Doest TBonz still admin that dinosaur?

 

[Cassie]

All the forums I belonged to over the years have faded away. People are addicted to endless scrolling now.

 

[Parallaxis]

All the forums I belonged to over the years have faded away. People are addicted to endless scrolling now.

Reddit just gobbled up what remained of the old school forum population. Kids moved on to twitter, Instagram, and discord. Anyone else was like, "Well, I don't like Reddit but that's where everyone's at."

 

[Cassie]

They will have to pry forums from my cold dead hands! lol

Srsly, I joined a couple fedi instances, but I prefer forums. Once you post something on something like that it just disappears in a few minutes. Forums are FOREVER.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

Welllll they are forever as long as someone is keeping the software updated lol. And converting the board to new software when the old software goes obsolete. And paying to host the forums. Etc etc etc lol

 

[Colonel Kira's Left Tit]

Oh yeah. Twain did start a something up, though it was short-lived IIRC. Was it green? I made a couple of posts there.

Twain. Now there's a name I haven't heard in nearly 20 years.

 

[Colonel Kira's Left Tit]

Reddit just gobbled up what remained of the old school forum population. Kids moved on to twitter, Instagram, and discord. Anyone else was like, "Well, I don't like Reddit but that's where everyone's at."

Reddit is okay I guess. but I did get banned from r/startrek suddenly a year or two ago simply for suggesting Discovery was terrible.

 

[The Question]

What, no love for Yours Truly and the TK/SDN "war"? lmfao

Okay, fine, I'll add that bit myself -- as best I can recall it, since it was literally 20 years ago now...

Okay, so I had trolled the shit out of Star Destroyer -dot-net as "John Clarke" and as "Ai Phling Pu." When those accounts got burned, I re-registered as, "Raoul Duke, Jr." and trolled a little bit more to establish a "bad boy" image, then "reformed" and pretended to go along with their groupthink viz an "Uncouth Yes-Man" tactic.

Then I took that "Uncouth Yes-Man" theme to TrekBBS, specifically The Neutral Zone, and played myself off as an absolute shitheel, while dropping breadcrumbs to lead those hooligans to SDN. Where unbridled fucking hilarity ensued.

 

[Colonel Kira's Left Tit]

What, no love for Yours Truly and the TK/SDN "war"? lmfao

That was quite entertaining, but I wasn't really around for it. RIP Tamar, though.

 

[The Question]

RIP Tamar, though.

I do miss my redheaded nemesis-cum-partner-in-crime. That one... was worthy.