Ooooh - good thread!
Adunaphel got it pretty much spot on for me too...
I was downloading the TG episodes when it still looked like in Bartboy's post. Read some thread about "hey, i want to move this to a new domain, any suggestions, i've got theis cool logo here.". Followed the site to the new domain, still leeching until May 2005, when
Viper had to take the torrent downloads offline and downloads were announced in the IRC channel. I promptly joined there, and became a regular. It took me 6 months to join the forums after that, and another 9 months for me to start posting here.
I was reading posts on the old site loooong before I signed up. But I was signed up before this community became FinalGear and have good memories of some of the threads with the old regulars (fond memories of Renesis' bitching... :lol: ). I remember VUKs early rips too and how superior they were (even the first ones) to "The Alternative"... :lol:
I didn't really need to download - only way back when (think it was in the second series) I missed an episode and a mate suggested I search for it online. This (well, what it was then) was the first place I came to, and I've not found anywhere to beat it.
And it was this site, and the Widget program that got me into doing coding of any kind
for fun (i.e. outside of work/Uni!)... (Hence the creation of that old RSS reader widget thingy I did - Alex, you still never put anything about that on the main page or anything... :lol: Too late now though - got no time (or a working copy of Windows) to sort it out...)
For some reason, people seem to like me here. And I really like this community. Be in denial or not, we are, insofar as internet forums go, a pretty close knit community.
Because of this forum, I started taking photography seriously...
Agreed on those points. I am now a mod on one other forum and admin on another, but both are smaller groups and many of the people on those forums have met each other. It still amazes me that here, a large group of people that have never met are all so close...
And although I used to do a heck of a lot of photography years back, I stopped for 4 years - not taking a single photo. It's thanks to Overheat's thread that I picked up a camera and fell in love with photography again! (I really ought to start submitting photos to the lens flair thread again...)
So...thank you Alex, for starting this site.
Yup - many many thanks Alex!
I may not post much at all (especially over the last couple of years) but I am here pretty much every day when time allows (I don't have internet at home; it's hard enough administering the other two forums without spending much time elsewhere online - all while at Uni).
Still, for some reason many of my posts are quite long anyway, so what I've not done in number of posts, I think I've made up for with length...