Back in November 2001, the internet probably had a few decent Harry Potter forums but where were they? Some sites may have had something that looked like a proper forum but with posts in the single-digits. Others had forums with quite a few members but pop-ups attacking users from every angle. And some places had thread-style forums without much organisation.
I'd been thinking of doing a forum for another site of mine (which is still without a forum and needs severe work done on it now - basically its a finance/stock market info site but currently without much up-to-date info). I'd been looking at various types of board software, trying to ideally find something written in PHP (as I've used PHP to program another site before). I'd found PHPbb and figured that I'd give the internet something that I'd found lacking in the first paragraph of this story, whilst at the same time seeing how PHPbb worked. So in a way, the Broomsticks And Owls forum was an experiment, but also was meant to make Broomsticks And Owls as a whole much more of a useful and hopefully friendly site.
The forum was born on the evening of November 5th 2001 (Guy Fawkes night in the UK). The first member was...er, me. I mentioned the forum to an online friend of mine in Carolina (Greenshep) to who I'm grateful for taking the place of first member after me, although she's never posted here yet. Saz1241 joined on the same day as Greenshep, 10th November 2001 but also hasn't posted. 12 Days later Quidditch_Potter joined and quickly became the first Moderator. After Quidditch_Potter in the memberslist is dragonica - that's me again - a non-administrator screenname I just use for testing purposes to make sure things work correctly on the board. Chaser#2 was the next active member, followed by keeper 4 Gryffindor, betwichin (a relatively prolific member in the early days) and Fenny, and with all these folks it started to feel that the forum was definitely taking off and some kind of small communnity was very slowy starting to be built.
Moving into late July and early August 2002, Wedge and The Rabid Chocobo joined. If the board has ever had anything like the Weasley twins, these were the guys! They're good people, fun and for some reason a strange obsession with chickens started. Gryffindor Student, Chocobo's girlfriend, joined a little later which made even more of a community feeling as this was our first real couple.
In August the board went through a big upgrade - yikes, that was a tough one. Took me about 16 hours non-stop, with more crashes of the board than I could count. I was determined to upgrade from the old PHPbb version 1.4.2 to version 2 though, which offered avatars and some nice extra feature, (some of which I've only last week figured out what they can do - watch out for more info soon about the Sorting Hat...but that's the future). An early archive of the Broosticks And Owls forum on PHPbb 1.4.2 can be found at
http://web.archive.org/web/200206040646 ... com/forum/ from back in May 2002 if you'd like to see how things were in the early days.
Our current top poster, Sonkem, joined on 11 September 2002 and quickly started bouncing off the walls of the virtually empty Hufflepuff common room before setting up a hugely successful Join Hufflepuff campain which has turned Hufflepuff into one of the most active houses (possibly
the most active house) on the board.
A few months later, I found out that members of another board seemed to know BaO in a friendly way as The Land of the Chicken Worhippers
. Thankfully some of those board members decided to join and most that I know of are still with us today.
I've always said, and truly mean it, that it's thanks to the members that the board is a place where I hope folks feel they enjoy. In many ways the forum has still only just begun. There's still a lot that I want to do.
by Mint » Friday 23 May 2003 3:01:36pm 
