MT Don't feel bad, I didn't remember it as our anniversary either! Technically, it is our anniversary of owning ShesOrganized.net but we've only been at GoDaddy since July 2008. For those history buffs, in October 2007 we started our website as this group, until then, had been hosted by others
This is how I recall the progression, I'd appreciate the oldies corrections about this.
Before the World Wide Web, there was Prodigy and CEO and other SHEs had a community there that shut down. Not sure who hosted that.
Then The Columbian newspaper in Vancouver, WA, home of P&P, hosted the Slob Sisters discussion board. We had a two or maybe three editions there (that's where the red dresses started at first anyone could post without authorization so we suffered from trolls one day and then 'members' who registered had their names show up in red.)
MysteryWoman adds: I remember an additional issue with the old "red dress" thread & scroll boards was that they were old technology that was no longer going to be supported. Zygorp and I shut down the old scroll board (essentially a proto-chat room for those of you who weren't there), continuing to post for a few hours after the official shutdown time. (I guess I never have known when to leave a party....
)
BTW: P&P are still mentioned at the paper, here's an article from 2010
http://www.columbian.com/news/2010/apr/19/on-the-money/
In Jan 1998, when I joined, it was called The Slob Sisters. At that point, it was my impression the board had been around about 6 months. I don't know that for fact but their first online message to SHEs was written in 1997.
We lobbied to have the name changed to refer to SHE that year because we found it depressing to log into a website that screamed SLOB! at us.
A number of the SHEs changed their handles from negative to positive as we realized that what we called ourselves made a difference in how we felt about ourselves. Carolina Messy became Carolina Miracle, Worthy renamed herself (I can't recall her negative name). Flybaby got her start here when we set up a mentoring system and eventually everyone wanted to be mentored by her.
We got to be too much trouble for The Columbian and Pam & Peggy were starting to figure out that their system had a large following that could be marketed to beyond the books. They also came up with the planner system "Bound to be Organized" geared for women who worked outside the home and were marketing training sessions for that. So they started the SHEsInTouch.com website and forums and that became our next home. They worked with Flylady, officially blessing her internet adaptation of their systems.
As health issues made their continued marketing of the SHE system not practical they started to wind down that part of the business so the forums needed to find a new home. As the shut down date came closer and closer, we worried but only a few of us had the technical knowledge of how to keep the forums going.
CEO of Organized Home offered a space to us first but that was not endorsed. Shortly after, Flylady made room for a forum on her website and that move was endorsed by P&P. The community split at that point and our village is the part that went to CEO's forum and grew from there. The other part went to Flylady and, were spun out, once again on their own in Sept. of 2007. Their boards are the ones that you link to from P&Ps page on the internet and can be found at SHEforums.com.
CEO hosted us on her own computers and eventually, the time involved with this extra work became too much and she asked that we take responsibility for ourselves. By then, the internet had evolved to the point where technically challenged people could host forums with the hosting software handled by specialists so we didn't need much in-house technical help.
In October 2007 under CEOs supervision, we moved to getPHPbb, a free online hosting site. We owned our web address but they handled everything for us. And, unfortunately, not well. So, after numerous, long, outages, Indiana and Mr. Indiana, again with CEO's technical advise, moved us to our own site hosted by GoDaddy, in July 2008.
Because the transition from CEO to getPHPbb to goDaddy was more under our control some of our older posts were recopied to here and we didn't lose all the information (recipes, tips, etc.) as we had on previous moves. But day to day posts were lost.
I got to post first on our 'opening day', not because I had more energy back then, but because I was in Spain at the time so it was easy to be first!
Here's a link to the PWYC thread 5 years ago:
http://shesorganized.net/phpbb/viewtopi ... =38&t=1523