I think the forum is even older than the first screen shot in Das Crows thread - I'm sure we've found posts from 2002?
As said it was started by a guy called William and there have been a lot of configurations of moderators and admins over the years but I think the selling of the forum and Chad taking over has been a massively possitive change for the forum.
I think the forum like the hobby is cyclical in some repects. Its hard to keep a tank running for a long time and at times its so frustraiting throwing in the towel is hard to avoid. Which means this forum often goes through flows of members and activity. Interestingly the appearance of new species and strains seems to bring waves of members too. I remember when Denison Barbs and Celestial Pearl Danios we seemed to get a lot of people coming and asking about them. The same happened with Electric Blue Jack Dempseys and more recently Electric Blue Acaras.
It would be tough going to track the history of the forum in some respects because each of these peaks in activity declines and the forum has times when it needs to rebuild. These declines come for all kinds of reasons, fall outs, peoples tanks failing, people moving away (either young people to colleges or universities or older people moving home or downsizing etc). And I think as pointed out it would be almost traumatic to go through this. Equally there are positive reasons a lot of people leave as they become more advanced and choose to niche off into a specific area and this forums broad appeal does not work for them - eg planted, cichlids, monsters etc.
One aspect of our history I find really cool is that most people connected to the hobby have been here. A lot of the famous YouTubers for example have had accounts here. George Farmer used to be really active here and I know I've seen reference to Steve Chen (IAPLC winner) having an account here. The Green Aqua guys I reckon will have been a member here because they were part of a planted forum that unofficialy spun off from this one. I'd be really surprised if some of the other big channels didnt have accounts here because this is the forum that comes up top off google and has done for many many years so if you are a big enough fish nerd to set up a youtube channel you're probably going to have started off talking about fish online.
I don't think its big headed of us to say that our forum is probably a big part of this hobbys foundations online, a lot of people will have started their online hobby here even if they moved on its still played a part in what they have gone on to do with their hobby.
Lastly one of the other things I love is just thinking about the numbers of fish and animals this forum will have saved over the year - from someone dealing with cycling to outbreaks of disease or parasites you can see day by day that the advice our members give have saved those fish and given them the best possible chance at life. Equally because of the traffic through this website of non-members I always think for every 1 person we help 10 others will read the advice and be helped in the same way.
Just a few thoughts on the subject
Wills
www.fishforums.net
