Who invented Scuba Board?

[getwet2]

I was thinking the other day while viewing the threads on SB. How did SB come to be? Who actually thought of the idea, who put the whole thing together and runs it? Does it cost these people anything to keep it going or do they actually make money by advertising different companies?

I looked around the board but couldn't find where any of this information was if it is there at all so I thought I would try here, hopefully someone can point me in the right direction or maybe even answer my questions.

Thanks!

 

[cobaltbabe]

and I looked through the archives but can't find it and for the life of me can't remember the answer. I am sure NetDoc will have the answers since he is the big man in charge right now.

 

[mariov]

Yeap who it the genious behind this great board ?

 

[The Chairman]

The ballad of King Neptune
(With apologies to all who loved Don McLean and his "American Pie")

Long, long time ago,
I can still remember
How Rec Scuba always made us cry!

But King Neptune thougt that he should,
Give us Scubaboard so that we could,
Talk about our diving with no more sighs!

So it was four years ago,
He and Tech Admin made it so
and invited all of us to come and play...

And so we've grown 20 thousand strong
And I still write these stupid songs!
Letting our advertisers pay our way-ay-ay-ay...

and we are singing...
"Dive dive, come and join us and dive!
Don't let your lead get heavy,
and we'll be alright!
All the moderaters keeping things going just fine,
Singing, "Dive, dive come and join us and dive!"

 

[SDAnderson]

Anybody got any Thorazine?

 

[ckharlan66]

The board was started and run for several years by the hard work of King Neptune and LadyDiver. I believe that it was sometime in 2000. Tech Admin was around for moral and tech support then too. They came up with the idea and designed the site and gave it to us the diving community to have as our SI hang out all solely from their love of the sport.

As the board grew and the number of posts became unmanagable for 2 people to keep up with the began to draw from the membership and add moderators to aide them in the administration of the board.

Later there started to be a large number of Texans on the board...so large that we had to segregate them in some way. They had started calling themselves Swamp Divers so naturally they were stuck in the Swamp Diving Forum. From that the different regional forums started to develop as we acquired a significant number of active members from a specific local.

A little over a year ago NetDoc acquired SB and since that time he, with the help of his advisors and mods, has continued to operate the board. The Ads that are now a part of SB are here to cover the cost of running the site. Previously it was done out of the pocket of the owners but with the ads provide an enviroment where the board is self-sufficient. This is good since NetDoc is getting up there in age and we aren't sure who he has left ownership to in his will and if they would be able to afford to keep the board going. (Sorry NetDoc I had to get a jab in on you somewhere this was all sounding too nice about you. )

So there you have a (very) brief history of the board. There have been countless friendships formed here and we are all very thankful for both the people that allow us to have this site and for the members that make it what it has become.

Chad

 

[The Chairman]

It was early 2000 when the board as we know it came to be. It was in the works way before then... I seem to remember Tech Admin mentioning that it has been 7 years or so. I was user #879 back in January 2001 when King Neptune and Lady Diver ruled this fair land. When I was made a moderator, most of the other moderators were "Medical Regulators" and all of the moderators were called "regulators". We were still trying to figure out what we were doing with this thing, and looked forward to finally breaking a thousand members... I think we were about a year old when we didit ! Wowsers that was some heady times. In a phone conversation, I remember KN telling me that we could expect to keep adding a whopping 2,000 members a year! BTW, I hope that Ted will come in and correct the dates... I wasn't here when it started, so I am not too sure. But I remember the "Sick Seven" and lots of fun going on even then. We all became friends and invited our friends to come play.

Unfortunately, changes started to occur in KN's and LD's life and in mid 2002 they could not be on as much. I and another mod were asked to take care of the board with Tech Admin's help. Somehow, I became the defacto leader of the moderators (very reluctantly, I assure you) but always deffered to the will of group. Financial hardships prevailed and KN and LD found it increasingly hard to get on. Unfortunately, they have hardly graced our presence for the last year. We miss them deeply.

Last November found our board about to fold... I had been paying for our servers at the time, and was going through my own "hard time". It was then that the many of the moderators chipped in and helped us stay afloat. I knew we had to change the way we financed this place, and I just hated the thought of begging for money all of the time. But the board was not mine, so I did the best I could... no, we ALL did the best we could to keep it together.

So when KN offered me the board, I jumped on it. There were a few stipulations and what not, but right around Thanksgiving of last year, I took full ownership of the board. There were some hard decsions to make, and some outright gambles as we brought our board out of debt and into the black. I was so unsure of things, that I kept my ownership a secret... really. Just a few knew, though many were starting to figure things out. We sure made our share of mistakes in December. But we have seemed to muddle through it and are getting ready for "phase 2": The scubaboard store, where you can FINALLY purchase t-shirst, mugs and even an HID light. All this will allow you to identify yourself with the world's premiere Diving Community and help make sure we can keep the servers turned on and connected to YOU.

So now we have 24,000 + registered users, and even more visitors. If you visit the Big Boards list, you will find out that we rank 11th in the world for sport related boards for number of members, and about 40th for number of posts. No other scuba related board even made the list!!! Recently, we have been able to open things up a lot as well, allowing busnesses better access to our marketplace areas. We still try to keep things "nice" and PG or better, and I think we keep growing because of that.

I hope this answers your questions. I sure am proud of this board, extremely proud of the Mod Squad, and am pleased to have been a part of it. We will be continuing to listen to your suggestions and try some new things out as we grow even bigger.

 

[The Chairman]

Chad, I believe we were typing at the same time... And I guess I deserved the "jab" after taking you for a ride throughout the keys! Yee-hawwwwwwwwwww!

 

[Ted S]

Pete already provided a good synopsis of the story of this board but I’m going to tell it all again to try and fill in any details… hopefully between our two posts you’ll be able to figure out the whole history! ScubaBoard was started by me, Tech Admin, userid #1 which was created on July 13th, 2000 at 12:00am. When I say created that means designed by me, not thought up… King Neptune gets the credit for that part of the operation as the original partner in what was once known as ScubaSource.com, Inc. At that time, I was a partner with King Neptune on the ScubaSource project which included ScubaBoard as a part of a network of several hundred Scuba related sites. As time went on the board, much to our amazement grew and grew and grew some more. At first we had really just opened the board as a small part of the network but when it became clear that there were more posts than eyeballs, something had to change and the original moderators were appointed.

Of course to really understand the formation of the board you need to scroll back a few more years to mid-1998 when King Neptune first purchased the ScubaSource.com domain name and turned a hobby into a Scuba-portal and business (see url http://web.archive.org/web/19981206001042/http://www.scubasource.com/). Prior to that point ScubaSource, which wasn’t even known as ScubaSource had just been a project of KN’s and as an avid diver; it was a big project indeed. Like the board, ScubaSource grew tremendously with numerous authors and dive experts joining the ranks and growing out the newly founded site. My involvement in the ScubaSource project started around December of 1998 providing consulting services to KN to help him with the site’s business aspects. By the time the board launched two years later, KN, LD and I were all putting a good 40+ hours a week (and often a lot more) into the project which had grown to include hundreds of domains, sites such as LearnScuba, ScubaHistory, ScubaDirectory, ScubaSearch, WomenInScuba and so many more. The actual relevance of ScubaSource isn’t really important any more except to show you the history of the entire backbone that lead upto ScubaBoard.

Looking back at archive.org (a site devoted to archiving copies of major websites) you can see the expodential growth and massive changes ScubaBoard has gone through since first opening it’s doors. The first several months showed virtually no activity as only a few users surfed to the forums but pretty soon traffic was growing and by August things had been well established (http://web.archive.org/web/20000816184225/http://www.scubaboard.com/) with a few hundred posts and the start of everything you see now. Skip forward to February 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20010201055900/http://www.scubaboard.com/ and we can see that while things haven’t really changed visually the post and user count is exploding. By the end of 2001 the forum closely resembles what we now call the ScubaBoard old layout as seen at http://web.archive.org/web/20011202231508/http://scubaboard.com/ a this point we were over 46,000 posts and the real growth trend has been established. A year later we see nearly 5 times the posts http://web.archive.org/web/20021129222454/http://www.scubaboard.com/ and in the most recent archive file from June 2003 http://web.archive.org/web/20030620082450/http://scubaboard.com/ we were upto 315,000 posts.

Since the archive capture lots has changed both with the look of the site and dynamics of the board. Pete and others explained how King Neptune’s reign ended last year and Pete’s began first as the de-facto leader of the mods and than as the owner. I myself have remained a part of the board since day one although my level of involvement has gone up and down over the years leading up to my new position in the current structure managing business development just like I did 6 years ago with ScubaSource. This is of course just a taste of the history of the board, perhaps in the future I’ll put together a book on the experience but until then you’ll have to come to DEMA to catch me in person if you want to hear the real good stories!

 

[adder70]

:06: You mean Al Gore didn't invent it?!