So yeah, post the oldest Massassi post of yours that you can find that hasn't been pruned. Of course, if you have a post that's even older saved somewhere then you can post that, but the idea is to post the oldest that's still on this forum.

If you do have a saved post that's further back in time than the forum will go, maybe just post both that AND the oldest that still exists here.

My first posts were in 2001, but my first one still available is in this thread created by me. It's from 02-07-2003 and I'll copypaste it here even though you can already see it by clicking that link.

My first post has never been pruned since I made it in the Main Editing Forum.

https://forums.massassi.net/vb3/showthread.php?8298-Dark-Forces-for-Mots

what a chump

Apparently my earliest post was pruned at some point; I answered someone's question in the COG forum.

Pruning is the devil. If I had life to do all over again I would find a way to not prune any posts from the forums. That said, the _original_ message boards are here and probably contain my first post.

http://www.massassi.com/etc/archived_msgboards/

Here's one.

For years I've wondered where the hell I did get all those mboard(n).zip files from, so I guess you must have posted them earlier at some point.

RE: "Here's one"

Scary enough, I could get a hold of all those 4 posters (assuming it's the same Gonk).

Yes, all four. C|;D

Oh man... does anybody realize how long ago it was this site started??? Look at this gem:

Brian, I presume those zips are all just the boards pre-mid 1999 when we switched over? Either way, I'm getting my hopes up that the proto-ISB threads are still saved somewhere.

The threads in question are something like:
"Nostradamos...scary stuff here" by GA_Farrant
"Enter my citadel by the fire" (not sure on title) by Merlin

Both would have been started in the mid, maybe early '99 era. Fairly certain the board system had been switched over but I could be wrong.

My first post was probably in '98 or '99. I remember lurking when we were at JediNights.com but I don't recall actually posting until I needed help with something once we moved to our own URL. Either way, I won't be sifting through all of that. However, at a brief glance, it's humorous to see how helpful CogKing was, despite LEC giving 0 effs. I was toying around with JK.EXE the other day & couldn't help but notice that the programmers said things like "...not supported yet." on a few occasions, so I'm guessing throwing us to the wolves was an internal political thing?

Between the wwwboard (shown in screenshots) and vbulletin (what we have now) we had UBB. Do you remember if it was on UBB? I do have some backups of ubbs but if the threads were pruned (not hacked) I probably don't have them. If they were hacked (but old at the time) I may have them somewhere. Unfortunately I have ~20 hard drives from over the years so it'd take me a while to look. I'm waiting for my brother to give back my drive enclosure before going spelunking.

I want to say they were on UBB (my recollection was we switched to that in early/mid '99, which I'm pretty sure is when I joined, or right before the transition, but I could be wrong). As much as I hope otherwise, my suspicion is that they would have been on the Discussion Board and pruned prior to hacked. I know archive.org didn't get the threads in any case, so if they do exist on one of your harddrives, it'd be quite a historic moment for the ISB.

With this talk, it should come as little surprise that my first post as it stands on this forum can be found within the first post of The Never-ending Story Thread:
https://forums.massassi.net/vb3/showthread.php?18360-The-Never-ending-Story-Thread&p=248526&viewfull=1#post248526

The earliest one I can find.

2007, but it made me lol

>_>

I really hope you have the UBB backed up somewhere. Those were the days that I think of my own personal golden years of Massassi -- they were the years that I started posting here, and posted most frequently.

I'm pretty sure that at some point in the past five years or so I did in fact find the UBB backed up on some web archive. I think since then I've read some of the posts from when a bunch of us were starting out on Solclaim when it started as a new server, which happened in June 2000 or so. But I can't find the web archive on Google now. Hopefully the UBB will turn up on one of your hard drives, if not somewhere else!

Oh, here's what I was thinking of: http://web.archive.org/web/19990915000000*/http://forums.massassi.net

Not much there.

Yes UBB! that is my earliest and fondest memories of Massassi. I'm not sure of what or when my first post was but it must be around 1999/2000.

I have some vague recollection of going to some temporary forum while something was going on. It may have been during the UBB era or between UBB and vBulletin. Does anyone else remember?