We are fast coming up on our 5th anniversary of our public launch. It doesn’t seem possible. The mailing list that predated BOB started in 1996 and lasted until 2002. BOB started in 2002 and has continued until today (yes, Captain Obvious, thank you for that nugget ) with what I think is a great deal of success.
Since five years seems somehow “special” we are offering 3 prizes for our contest this year.
Awesome! What can I win?
First prize will be a $50 gift certificate to Amazon, which you can always use to pick up something from Shop@BOB if you are so inclined. We’re going to be updating the contents in the next few days, including some of Robert Schmidt’s new offerings as well as other suggestions that have been made.
Second prize will be a final edition BOB T-shirt and a BOB hat. T-shirts come in a variety of sizes, hats are “one-size-attempts-to-fit-all”. Barry Bonds need not apply.
Third prize will be a choice of either a shirt or hat.
Sounds great, how do I win?
Details will be posted very soon. Afterall, BOB’s 5th birthday is coming up fast. August 15, 2007 is just around the corner. Stay tuned.
It’s five. And I’m still working on the birthday thing…
It was five years ago today, in 2002, when the email went out to the BUSOB-L mailing list announcing that BOB existed. It was Aug 31 when the list was shut off and BOB took over.
I do absolutely believe that, and have said it on more than one occasion.
The tagline for the phpBB software that we use is “Creating Communities” and that is certainly what we all have managed to do together. The mailing list started in 1996, if my memory is correct, and lasted until 2002. So as long as BOB has been around we still have one more year to go to match that. I believe that we will, and then some. And it is the community, not the efforts of any one individual, that will make that happen.
Ah, remember when he was concieved? When the listserve dumped the archives or was when their servers crashed or when… Those days are long gone. has given us a much better place to live!
From one of the slides in the presentation I linked to: As of November 14, 2004
6929 total members
4163 of those members have at least one post (68%)
Average nearly 8 new members every day
Over 7.5 million cumulative page views
121977 posts in 25037 topics
Average 136 posts per day
Average 28 new topics per day
As of August 15, 2007
26611 total members
14275 of those members have at least one post (54%)
Average nearly 14 new members every day
Over 43 million cumulative page views, over 1 million page views a month
341005 posts in 73925 topics
Average 180 posts per day*
Average 39 new topics per day
The only number that has gone down is the percentage of members with at least one post. We’re going to be purging the user database soon of any member that has never logged in (there are several thousand members that registered and activated but have never logged in) so that percentage will go back up some.
*Many of those in Michael’s “Do not post in this topic” topic, no doubt…
The mailing list that predated BOB started in 1996 and lasted until 2002. BOB started in 2002 and has continued until today (yes, Captain Obvious, thank you for that nugget 
) with what I think is a great deal of success.
We’re going to be updating the contents in the next few days, including some of Robert Schmidt’s new offerings as well as other suggestions that have been made.
(BOB member since 2003-12-02)
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
(BOB member since 2002-06-06)
(BOB member since 2005-07-18)
(BOB member since 2002-08-08)
(BOB member since 2003-11-27)
(BOB member since 2002-06-17)
(BOB member since 2002-06-06)
(BOB member since 2007-04-03)
(BOB member since 2006-05-11)