Yeah, that's either impressive restraint or a guy who just doesn't wish to post often. Either way, better to encourage than to deride this long time 'contributing member', I say. In the grand scheme of things, neither you or I post that often (considering our join date) compared to many who just run on and on and on......
This is about the time I noticed a divide in the forums. Before the election, it was Clutchfans vs the kiddie trolls. Everyone got along in the GARM and the Dish. Perhaps it was in this time frame in which the average American was getting hooked on the Information Super Highway and brought forth the idiocy.
My "crowning achievement" with ClutchFans was when Sina.com referred to this place as "the BimaThug website" in one of its reports. I nearly pissed my pants laughing at that.
If you look at any time of day, there are A LOT more lurkers/non-members viewing the forum than members. Some folks are more content taking a backseat to the madness. I used to be the same way until I hit 1000 posts
As host of the site for ~two years, I have one trivia question to add Who caused Clutch to move to vbulletin from the previous software...which was one of the biggest disruptions of the site ever, worthy of the lists being made here. I'm disappoint no one mentioned this big change, yet. I think we were down for two days. HINT: It was a summer move.
Hint 2: Think big changes in Houston Rockets history. EDITED...because response was too much of a spoiler.
Yao Ming? I remember when 200 users would blow up the board. Now we have 400 in the middle of the night in the preseason.
The biggest event I remember was when it moved from .com to .net. I almost had a heart attack when I saw the rivals site. It took me two days to figure it out. I always figured that it was clutch cashing in during the dot com bubble. I didn't realize that wasn't the case until a few years ago.
I first found it when it was .com. I am pretty sure that is what it was when I finally registered (lurked for 4 months or so), then the switch to .net which I knew about beforehand. That was no big deal. I never liked the name switch to ClutchFans but what can you do. I loved this site in the beginning. It was my only foray into online community life. I was never interested before but something about the Rockets/basketball angle combined with that original group of posters got me interested. Probably the only reason I still visit and post despite getting older and less engaged. I had a fake beef with CriscoKidd for a while. Had some early clashes with heypartner, Kagy, and evil MadMax. MacBeth always thought I was threatened by him which I found hilarious because it was actually the opposite. I remember Batman Jones being annoyed when I suggested Macbeth was disingenuous. BJ thought he was one of the most honest posters on the board. I do remember the switch to Vbulletin and the site being down but don't really remember the reasoning. Did it have something to do with a hurricane? I don't remember.
This is really cool, yet not, that you don't remember...which means we did our job.. HINT 4...site went down on Rockets news. At that time, unprecedented amount of cfnet traffic, like orders of magnitude. We couldn't recover. Something big happened that took out the previous database. flat file Clutch, Josh and I gave up, and went to Plan B, which Clutch had been planning for awhile. We were able to reconstruct the site with little notice (under new software because Clutch had in targeted already). It wasn't a hurricane. What took out the flat file db to switch to mysql/vbulletin was a person.
The team sure has come a long way from the fan base jizzing in its collective pants for none other than...Mo Taylor.... Sigh.
People like to tout the 99ers, but there actually was a rockets forum prior to 99. I actually came to the rockets forum by way of a webpage called launchpad, which im not sure people remember, but was run by Darkhorse, Ive been told.
