For the first few days the forums were invisible to most. Then on Thursday 10th March I added a link from the main site to the new forums and people began to join up.
So, some time in March 2025 it will be the forum's 20th birthday!
Forums Birthday
Forums Birthday
On Saturday 5th March 2005 at 07:17, my late friend 'Slimline' Peter launched these forums and made me the first member. At that time the ACD was hosted on FreeUK, which didn't support interactive sites, so Peter generously installed the forums on his own server with its own address.
For the first few days the forums were invisible to most. Then on Thursday 10th March I added a link from the main site to the new forums and people began to join up.
So, some time in March 2025 it will be the forum's 20th birthday!
For the first few days the forums were invisible to most. Then on Thursday 10th March I added a link from the main site to the new forums and people began to join up.
So, some time in March 2025 it will be the forum's 20th birthday!
Re: Forums Birthday
If I needed any more excuses to visit????
420 2025 = 20 ACD years - we need a celebratory session.............I might need to attend.
420 2025 = 20 ACD years - we need a celebratory session.............I might need to attend.
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Tokeing tom
- Posts: 617
- Joined: Tue 24th Sep 2019 08:46 am
- Location: Ireland
Re: Forums Birthday
Let us know what date u decide so we can celebrate globally with a nice smoke in your honour 🎖
Re: Forums Birthday
Our first 420 in April 2006 was a celebration of the forum's first birthday so it follows that we should celebrate its 20th birthday in Amsterdam in April.Tokeing tom wrote: Sat 11th Jan 2025 02:37 pm Let us know what date u decide so we can celebrate globally with a nice smoke in your honour 🎖
Re: Forums Birthday
Prehistory of the ACD Forums
The ACD was born in 1998 and grew rapidly. Around 1999 I began to encourage people to send in coffeeshop reviews by email so that I could publish them on the site. By about 2003 the quantity of emails I was receiving was getting quite time-consuming to process. I began to dream of some mechanism to enable people to upload reviews themselves. At that time the ACD was hosted on FreeUK, which didn't allow any kind of software to be run on the server, so only static pages were possible.
Many of my email correspondents mentioned that they were members of Channels Forums. It dawned on me that, if the ACD had its own forums, these correspondents could post their own reviews and discuss subjects between themselves. The only trouble was, I didn't know how to create a forum.
Then one day a good friend of mine called Brian (RIP) mentioned that he had been telling a friend of his called Peter (a.k.a. 'Slimline' RIP) about my website and that he was keen to get involved. Peter had sites running on his own server and the knowledge and means to create forums. Peter and I discussed the idea of a forum for the ACD. He then, very generously, created a forum on his server and handed it over to me.
Ongoing History
Over the subsequent years the forums moved through various domain names and were hosted on various servers.
Peter initially used a subdirectory on his own domain name (localinet.co.uk) but, when he became concerned that it might be detrimental to his business, he created a domain specifically for the forums (coffeeshopdirect.info). When Peter died in 2015 we lost the hosting and the domain name. Some people who were using that domain directly were probably lost at that time.
The forums were revived again thanks to FBN of menus fame. He allowed us to squat on his server for a while where we used the domain name acdforum.site.
Next came HullDJ (RIP). In 2016 he provided hosting for the whole of the ACD, including the forums. Finally the whole site was united under coffeeshopdirect.com.
HullDJ himself died suddenly in 2023. At that point I finally had to start paying for hosting.
Plural or Singular?
Is it a forum or a collection of forums?
For a long time I always thought of the entity as a forum divided into sections, sub-sections and so on. I thought of the conversations as threads of posts. That made sense to me but didn't match the terminology used by the software.
The official structure consists of categories, forums, sub-forums, topics and posts.
In more recent times I've tried to use the official terminology to avoid any confusion. That's why I now refer to the ACD Forums rather than ACD Forum.
The ACD was born in 1998 and grew rapidly. Around 1999 I began to encourage people to send in coffeeshop reviews by email so that I could publish them on the site. By about 2003 the quantity of emails I was receiving was getting quite time-consuming to process. I began to dream of some mechanism to enable people to upload reviews themselves. At that time the ACD was hosted on FreeUK, which didn't allow any kind of software to be run on the server, so only static pages were possible.
Many of my email correspondents mentioned that they were members of Channels Forums. It dawned on me that, if the ACD had its own forums, these correspondents could post their own reviews and discuss subjects between themselves. The only trouble was, I didn't know how to create a forum.
Then one day a good friend of mine called Brian (RIP) mentioned that he had been telling a friend of his called Peter (a.k.a. 'Slimline' RIP) about my website and that he was keen to get involved. Peter had sites running on his own server and the knowledge and means to create forums. Peter and I discussed the idea of a forum for the ACD. He then, very generously, created a forum on his server and handed it over to me.
Ongoing History
Over the subsequent years the forums moved through various domain names and were hosted on various servers.
Peter initially used a subdirectory on his own domain name (localinet.co.uk) but, when he became concerned that it might be detrimental to his business, he created a domain specifically for the forums (coffeeshopdirect.info). When Peter died in 2015 we lost the hosting and the domain name. Some people who were using that domain directly were probably lost at that time.
The forums were revived again thanks to FBN of menus fame. He allowed us to squat on his server for a while where we used the domain name acdforum.site.
Next came HullDJ (RIP). In 2016 he provided hosting for the whole of the ACD, including the forums. Finally the whole site was united under coffeeshopdirect.com.
HullDJ himself died suddenly in 2023. At that point I finally had to start paying for hosting.
Plural or Singular?
Is it a forum or a collection of forums?
For a long time I always thought of the entity as a forum divided into sections, sub-sections and so on. I thought of the conversations as threads of posts. That made sense to me but didn't match the terminology used by the software.
The official structure consists of categories, forums, sub-forums, topics and posts.
In more recent times I've tried to use the official terminology to avoid any confusion. That's why I now refer to the ACD Forums rather than ACD Forum.