The first member of the Warrior Forum was...?

2002 was when the old Warrior Forum was moved to the new Warrior Forum so those are dates that members signed up or were created in the Snitz based forum. Later that was changed to the current version.

I joined in 1999 and many current Warriors were already members.

Mark

I don't know about the 1998 date, but I first became a Warrior in 1997. So there's a few of us that actually have the 1998 date beat.

For all the Warrior noobs that joined in the last decade or so, the 2002 date that seems to be the start of the Warrior Forum is really just the date the forum became "open" to the public (and search engines).

Kurt, I remember the old days in the Uni. I became a member back when Allen sold a package and allow people that purchased it to join. Can't remember the date or my old user name from back then. For some reason I think my name was Trademark? Damn this old age shit...lol

In all my years here at the WF I've never seen any member with a join date before 2002.
Thought that the 1998 looked kinda funny...just saying!

I'm thinking it was Stone or Cory. Maybe Paul.

The July 2002 date is when Allen moved it from Uni-sol to a self-hosted system using Snitz. Everyone had to rejoin at that point, which is why it's the default "oldest" date showing. Those members were migrated to vBulletin in 2008, when he switched to that platform. Existing stats, specifically join date and post count, were carried over.

The "Thanks" option was added shortly after that, in September of 2008.

Other than Allen, Joshua Brown was probably the first member, as he was the one who owned Uni-sol.com.


Paul

Kurt,

Did Planet Ocean have a forum back then? If so, that would likely have been the biggie.


Paul

Hi Paul,
>>> View Profile: Mo Goulet
Fluke, hack or New Admin Approved...lol? Just asking.

Have a Great Day!
Michael

Not sure, Michael, but he was definitely around before 2002.

It's not hard to change those dates if you have access to the right screens. I doubt anyone wants to be doing it as a regular thing, though. It's hard to be sure who joined when, and it would be a pain to do a bunch of them even if you knew the right dates.


Paul

Paul, I just had to ask. As I said before, I've never seen anyone with a join date prior to 2002.
Thanks for the reply!

Have a Great Day!
Michael

Those were big, but I'm not sure which was the Big Dog back then. Sullivan was the biggest mainstream name in the SEO biz in the late 90s, but it isn't something I followed enough to say who was first with any confidence.

Hell, Ralph Wilson did a lot on SEO at the time, and he's been around for ages. I think I signed up for Web Marketing Today in 1996 or 1997. He had 1300 subscribers at the time, which was impressive for those days.


Paul

A little trip down Memory Lane...

Web Position Gold was THE SEO software.

There weren't many affiliate programs, but there were a few. I did OK with Net Detective, which was huge back then. I also did OK with Hotel Reservations Network (HRN) which became Hotels.com.

Overture was the first major PPC and became Go.com, which was bought by Yahoo and is now the Yahoo advertising network. Is Bing now part of the same ad network?

There were 6-7 search engines that were all about equal:
Infoseek
Alta Vista
Excite
HotBot/Inktomi
Looksmart
Lycos
Snap
Webcrawler

Bascially, everyone's favorite search engine was the one that ranked their own pages the highest.

I developed one of the first keyword research tools back then. I believe I was the first to include the value of a click in the ratings. I was a decent poker player back then and I based "value" on the concept of "pot odds" in poker.

Keyword research was much more accurate back then. Sites like Infoseek and Hotbot would post the relevancy in a percenage in the SERPS. For keywords like "SEO", the first 300 results would have a score of 100% relevancy. Other keywords would have #1 ranked pages with a relevancy score of something like 59%. This made it very easy to check the level of competition.

And Overture posted its bids for clicks in pretty much real time, so it was easy to get a good gauge of the value of a particular kkeyword phrase.

I quit selling my keyword research tool when these resources where no longer available and felt (still do) that keyword research became pretty much guesswork.

The ironic thing is, in independant tests back in about 1999, Hotbot tied or beat Google in just about every competition for relevancy. But the media fell in love with Google for some reason, and we know the rest.

And Yahoo, the biggest site at the time bought Inktomi, which was the tech behind Hotbot. But instead of using their own Inktomi tech, they decided to use Google for their search results, giving Google the money and prestige it needed. I never understood why Yahoo paid Google for search tech, when they owned Inktomi.

Mike,

Remember the affiliate system that did nothing but carry an ID from one page to another? That one gave a lot of people fits, too. "Perl variables? Query strings? Substitution? Wuzzat?"


Paul

Kurt,
Those were the good ol days in my eyes. Fond memories. ... in those days it was hard not
to make money.

Paul,
I made some perl scripts back then ... some heavy duty mammer jammers that
I still use today. I just don't have the heart to convert them to php.

Just for clarity ... i remember the first time i called my merchant account and said
I want to sell ---- on the internet. The first guy said ... whats that?
the second guy told me i had to talk to a higher up. The higher up
said that will never be allowed. When i think back to that conversation
it is hard not to chuckle.

[chuckle] Remember when X.com (later to become Paypal) first came out? They paid referrals of $10 per new member who completed the registration and verification process.

Made a few bucks on that one. Also got a lot of questions like "Who the hell will ever use this?," "Why do they need all that information?," and "Are you out of your mind, Myers?" I remember one guy who unsubscribed then. He quoted the recommendation for X.com and replied with the comment, "Fantasyland."

Of course, people used to berate me for the idea that unsolicited bulk email would ever reach the point where volume would be a problem, too...


Paul

I was a member of the article network. You joined posted an article that appeared on a page all by itself but was linked to another article that was linked to another article that was....get the point?

I couldn't think of an article so I looked online and found an article by One, Allen Says. If I remember correctly it was on analysis paralysis. I contacted Allen Says and asked him if I could use his article on this new thingy called "The Article Network." He wrote me back and said "Sure, go ahead."

A few months later I found out the Article Network was owned by Allen Says. He must have gotten a good laugh off of that. I'm using his article as my own, (with permission) on his site.

Anyway, one day it was announced that the Article Network was going out of business because Allen was going to do something else. Turned out to be the Warrior Secret Site.

I got spammed til I broke down and joined. (of course it wasn't spamming it was getting email LOOK I GOT ANOTHER EMAIL WOW!!!) I sent a check for $37 or $47 to somebody and within a week the secret site which I had already joined now opened up to me using my password.

The secret site was Marvelous. It had things in it like "The Magic Floppy." Portal Pages by Willie Crawford, Some kind of detective spy thing, magic ebooks the likes of which I'd never seen. And who could forget "Coming Soon, THE GURU KILLERS, which never came LOL) On and on.

As an afterthought it had a Secret Forum you got as a bonus. That forum on Uni-Sol was where I joined the WF. Seems like around '95. Time flies when you're having Fun.

Disclaimer: The above is the time frame that exists in my mind 10 computers and 500 email accounts later. I wish I still had that cancelled check. Oh well.

George Wright

Teresa King was the person who directed me to Allen's place.
Like Kurt and others have said, a boatload or articles and scripts,plus access to the forum as a bonus I believe. Hard to believe many of us are coming up on the 20 year mark,