1. There were no categories or subforums, so the message board kind of resembled something like this:
First Topic
RE: reply to first topic
Re: next reply to first topic
And the sucky part was that, if the reply didn't get a response for so many days, the topic in question would just poof. So it was sort of like a time limit system more than anything. The same went with PMs. You would get a PM from somebody, but if you had any intentions of responding to that PM, you only had so long to do so before THAT got automatically deleted as well. That sucked too, because someone could say, after your PM automatically disappeared,
Person #1: Did you recieve my PM on the Backboard yesterday?
You (the reciever): Huh, you sent me a PM?? Or it could be something like this (...) if you were really confused.
Person #1: Yeah, it was about such and such subject.
You (the reciever): I'm going to have to ask you to send me the PM again, because I think I missed it.
Yeah, it really sucked like that. So finally, during the fall of 2007, they got the last available version of PHPBB2 (whichever that was that year), and that helped out tremendously. We actually had a message board where you HAD to register, so that really cut down on lost topics and potentially lost PMs. Plus, it's like a friend of mine on there said:
Poof meaning disappear.The best part is, threads don't poof!
Naturally, knowing nothing about forums at the time, only knowing that spam and posing as others were both bad news no matter how you looked at it, and knowing nothing as to what to look for when it comes to nice forums, I even thought the new board was really nice and a major improvement over the other one. Sadly, the place has died out over the course of three years, and now all our posts seem to be saying the same things, like "wow, this board is practically dead!" or "where is everybody these days?"
So yeah, that was the first forum I ever joined.