UKFF Silver Anniversary! (massive asterisk)

[JNLister]

Dopper (who has lost his login) has noted that today is 25 years since the current incarnation of UKFF started. It had been running for a couple of years before that, but 18 September 2001 was when the database was relaunched, people had to reregister their accounts, and the current post counts/database history started that day. No doubt we'll all talk about our wrestling/non-wrestling chat/nonsense in this thread, but don't let's overlook the technical impressiveness of a forum database surviving for a quarter of a century.

[DavidB6937]

I always think it's absolute madness that we're still here - both from a general life perspective and a technological one too.

Even now nothing gives me close to a heart attack more than those days this place goes down. It would be absolutely fucking mental for people to just disappear out of my life.

[The Gaffer]

I'm hoping to hold on until the TKO buyout. No way I'm posting once my avatar's been changed to a logo for Patriot compression socks. 

[RedTwoster]

18 minutes ago, DavidB6937 said:

Even now nothing gives me close to a heart attack more than those days this place goes down. It would be absolutely fucking mental for people to just disappear out of my life.

Likewise - I've said it before, but it's a really nice community on here, and I would be really gutted if all of the wonderful people on here were to suddenly disappear from my day-to-day. There are loads of places in which you can talk about wrestling - but very few in which you can talk about it with such knowledgeable, funny and just generally lovely people. 

It's wild to think that not only was I a non-fan when this place started, I was in my very early days of high school. Heck, come to think of it, I lived very rurally and I'm not entirely certain I even had internet access back then - if I did, it would have been the shittiest of shitty dial-up. 

[Lorne Malvo]

You'd get less for murder!

(I know this doesn't make sense)

[JLM]

@Moo Speech! Speech! Speech!

It really is astonishing that this place has endured. I’ve left for periods of months and at times even years but it’s always here when I come back. Very close to 25 years for me as a poster, will be celebrating that milestone in November. Maybe get a new avatar, really puts the boat out.
 

Thanks to our hosting and moderating overlords and for everyone who contributes. Even the turds and the trolls over the years, you have all helped me pass much downtime at work and been an outlet for discussing wrestling on the internet when the wider chatter on the subject is largely unbearable.
 

It’s also really cool to have grown up alongside other enjoyers of this absurd hobby. Some of my friends in real life have dipped in and out of wrestling at various times but they have never gone deep into the subject. It’s comforting and fascinating to hear from others who have a similar experience to my own and grappled with following this endlessly entertaining and frequently utterly appalling shit show over multiple decades. My friends in real life watched the Vince doc but they’ve never been shafted by a BritWres catastrophe or tried to sit through Regal’s podcasts. 
 

That’s not even getting into the excellent community of excellent people and some of the finest anecdotes of all time in off topic. Any topic that turns into story time on here has the potential to deliver gold that continues to surprise me long after I thought I’d heard it all. I often struggle with the idea of Britishness/Englishness and cultural identity etc. I am not patriotic, I find flag waving nationalism pretty repellent. However, revelling in the horrors of a disastrous Family Christmas dinner or unpacking the revelation that someone has been pooing wrong their whole life fills me with a deep sense of pride and gratitude , because the British and the Irish are the best in the world at it and this place showcases that in spectacular fashion. 

Edited 20 hours ago by JLM

[DazzM]

I've only recently started posting sporadically again. Used to post quite a bit on my @Dazz account, but have lost access to it. Can't believe looking at that profile that it was as long ago that this I started here. 

I've seen tons of forums come and go in that time, yet the UKFF keeps going. Kudos. 

It's actually one of my primary sources for news/info/thoughts in Wrestling, even though I don't get as much a chance now to watch as I'd like.

[Chris B]

A reminder that, if people want to keep this place going, it's worth donating. 

[Carbomb]

A quarter of a century. Wow. A forum older than a chunk of the adult population.

It really is impressive, not just how long this place has been going, but also just how much of a detailed and developed culture we have on here now, from years of growing organically, in spite of the dominance of bigger social media platforms.

[DavidB6937]

1 minute ago, Carbomb said:

in spite of the dominance of bigger social media platforms.

I approach my internet consumption in the same way that I approach life in general - more people bad less people good.

[Carbomb]

Just now, DavidB6937 said:

I approach my internet consumption in the same way that I approach life in general - more people bad less people good.

Opposite of how I like my orgies though

[DavidB6937]

15 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

Opposite of how I like my orgies though

You're on here. The closest you're getting to an orgy is a bunch of blokes telling you their shit cycles while you all sit in a chippy.

[LaGoosh]

55 minutes ago, Chris B said:

A reminder that, if people want to keep this place going, it's worth donating. 

Definitely! And as an added bonus you get to join the Paid Members section where us cool kids talk mad shit about the rest of you*.

What a place. Pretty much the only website I actually use every day. Every time it goes down I feel weirdly bereft. It's definitely my online home. In today's Internet where forums have mostly disappeared and been replaced by God awful social media communities I'm glad we're all still here. Best site on the Web.

*not really! Well, maybe a bit.

[Fog Dude]

I thought the "massive asterisk" was gonna involve some dodgy tracing of the boards' origins back to 1966, which would make it predate ARPANET. So, in the interests of being the resident pedant around here, I feel the need to point out we're talking about a silver anniversary here, aren't we?

Wasn't in any of the predecessor (or rival) forums but did start lurking after about a year, then decided to dive in and set up an account a few months later and you've all had to suffer ever since. The other two wrestling message boards I hung around in at the time were both American. One definitely doesn't exist now and the other I haven't even checked on for decades, but they just didn't feel right compared to here anyhow. You're all a decent bunch really.

[Moo]

Ha that is mental. I also think it's probably off by at least a few years - we might be closer to 30 in reality! As I get older, I forget more and more of the details but when I got involved it was on a shared forum (modern day we'd call it a SaaS!) hosting platform and was super basic... like a newsgroup essentially but somehow the worst of both worlds - newsgroups and the web mashed together in one awful threaded UI.

Then we moved it to... ikonboard if I remember correctly... and perhaps a few other iterations I've forgotten and many many hosting providers and outages along the way. The current software is InvisionBoard, and they are price gouging us and every customer... so I see another migration on the horizon to keep our running costs under control.

My goal has always been to not interfere too much and to try and resist the temptation to plaster the place with advertising. I feel like in the early days there was so much immature silliness that the forum required a lot of rules and a lot of moderation. I suspect because we've all aged, things are much calmer now. It would be fun to do a UKFF census one day to validate if we are just all old bastards who've been here ~forever.

And YES - if you haven't donated to the running costs, please consider it... https://donate.ukff.com/