Anyone remember

[bobg]

   The site that started out with a dog setting in a chair playing a banjo?  I use to be on there a lot years ago. Got some great info on shooting the Contender. Clicked on it one day and it was gone. Switched me to GBO which i had never seen before. Kinda wondering if this wasn't the original GBO.
      bobg

[Graybeard]

Nope I don't recall us ever having had anything like that on here.

[bobg]

  Thanks Bill. I became a member here in November of 2002 so it was before that. Sure wish i could remember the name of it. Oh well. At least i found this site.

[Graybeard]

We started some time in '97. At that time it was mostly just a personal home page with some info on who I am and what I enjoyed doing. I quickly added info on handgun hunting and tools to use doing it.

Our first attempt at Forums were from an outfit that offered free forums called Bravenet.com. They were quite limiting in what was allowed tho and when the number of posts NOT threads but posts reached 200 they pruned off the oldest which often meant the post that started a thread was dropped but some replies remained. It didn't take long to figure out that wasn't gonna cut it.

So Matt got busy and wrote a software program to run our forums. It was the old cascading format that allowed you to make your post directly under that of the person and post you were replying to rather than just at the bottom of the thread. I liked that style and honestly still think I prefer it to this type but this is what the world has moved to so it's what we use.

Around November of 2002 we dropped the software Matt had written for us and went to a new software similar to this but it was kinda easily hacked it seems and we got hacked several times while using it. There were some real security issues with it. So Matt went searching for a better more secure software for us and we moved to this and at least so far have not been successfully hacked since tho many attempts have been made.

In the early days all the pages other than the forums had music on them so that when you opened the page some muscial score I liked came on. The Home Page had Amazing Grace and many folks in those days commented they came here just to listen to Amazing Grace and they didn't move on to the next page until it was finished playing.

These days there are far too many pages to have a unique  tune for each so we dropped the music.

In those very early days we had a photo of the house we lived in from some time in '91 to July '94 when we moved here. I had a photo of it when there was an unusual for us heavy snow on the ground. The house was field stone and cedar on the outside and it looked like a cabin out in the woods in the photo. To enter the site you clicked on the front door of my house to enter my website.

[lakota]

When I first got internet access in late 1997 I remember logging on here. Graybeard and the old shooters.com were my favorite websites. I cant remember what my original screen name was on here. I opened a new account and picked the screen name Lakota in 2001-that was the year I got my first lab puppy who is named Lakota.

I was really into T/C Contenders when I first found the site.