Back then there were less joke characters (and the ones that existed were actually entertaining) and trolling.
Joined on 7-6-2002, 9 frickin years! This is the first time I have ever checked the actual day & month, it seems like yesterday...wow.
In total numbers of signed up members this might be true but I think in terms of posting native English speakers have outnumbered Chinese language posters. Especially the last two years that Yao has been pretty much been out. I used to lurk back in the late 90's and then signed up in 2000 under a different account. It seems like the biggest change is that there were much more quality posts in the GARM. There still are quality posts but it seems like they have gotten more watered down with reactionary posts to wins and losses and trade and fire posts.
Im on clutchcity since 97, but I didnt join the forums till '03, I just read the front page and the articles, wallpapers, music, that clutch posted.
I was under the impression that internet access was not available in Mexico till mid 2004. Only those involved in government or narco-trafficking had internet access earlier. Around 2003 or so at the earliest. I remember reading this in an encyclopedia once when I was hiking in Peru. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Counting the original site, I've spent half my life on here and this was one of the first websites that I went to regularly after discovering that there were pictures on the web instead of using the Lynx text based browers to surf online.
Found this site back in college around 96 or 97 I think. Didn't join the forums until much later. Back then I would mostly read the GARM, now I'm rarely in there. There used to be solid discussion back then, now well not so much, seems to have taken a steep down turn during the Tracy-Yao era...
I didn't lurk much, but I did, and read lots of early news people broke here before others did. So... you read it only for the articels, huh? YEAH, RIGHT. That's what we ALL say. You are wrong. That must have been an extremely old encyclopedia or old data. I was IRC'ing with lots of peeps from different campuses of the major Mexican universities and research companies back in the mid 90's, and they talked about the Interwebnets and domains and large networks. There were plenty of ISP's in Mexico in the late 90's, with most of them being Universities and large corporations. And, yes, while only a special sector had "access to internet," it was mostly people with money or in college, or a combination. Why would only illegal peeps have access to stuff that needed communication towers, cables, stuff that would easily be tracked, etc.? That wouldn't make sense, in my opinion.
This! I hardly EVER go to the GARM anymore to post. I'll just scroll through it to see if there is any breaking news, but the Yao-era really killed it. But the Hangout is still great.
I lurked around for a few years before joining. I started looking at the posts back in 2002 but finally joined back in 2005. I do think the GARM has changed a lot. There are way to many crappy posts that get a lot of attention now compared to posters that make great threads. I do think that the whole T-Mac/Yao started a lot of it.
Ditto, just kind of look for any news but that's about it, occassionally I'll try and read through a few threads but most don't have much solid discussion, a shame. Hangout is awesome though.
Been 10 years for me as well. GARM has gone downhill over that time, and I don't think Clutch does as much updating and article writing for the main site as he used to, but the rest of the site is still great. The growth of this site over the past decade has just been too difficult to control and monitor all the threads and users, but it is still the best run forum of any real size that I've seen.
clutch has been doing a fair bit of writing on the blog. I left the GARM for a while, but Ten Years After, I'm going home to my baby. I read the GARM a lot more this yr. Stopped now . I thought there was good stuff. It's just cluttered. So much noise. To find the good stuff, click on on number of responses, which will give you who posted, and then click on the person's name you want to read and it will show their posts. Beats slogging through zillions of pages. Once I finally figured that trick out, the GARM became less overwhelming.
Comin up on eleven here....whoa....I think partly a reason the GARM was more frequented by the older posters was due to the fact that the community was alot smaller and we knew most posters nicknames and styles and therefore "characters"....now the board has so many people it's hard to keep track of trolls. Oh yeah and def no used gel for sale 10 years ago. And Rocketeer wallpapers....Rodrick Rhodes & Tracy Murray references.....
