Guess it's time for a bit of history especially for those of you that are new(er), NEPA Crossroads or the start of it will be 5 years old exactly Fri Oct 01, 2004 8:35 pm EST. That would be the exact time I hit the Install button on this new fangled software called phpBB I had been using on another web site. It was actually my first adventure into the wonderful world of php and all the things you can do with it. I actually credit phpBB for forcing me to learn programming. At that point in time I had built a few websites but was still using just HTML. The original installation was not on the this domain but instead on nepadigital.com which is my business site. I don't have any original screen shots unfortunately but I do have the next best thing which is archive.org which crawled the site on October 24th of 2004:
http://web.archive.org/web/200410241918 ... al.com/bb/
One thing to note is archive.org can sometimes be a little slow or unresponsive. Here's a screen shot of the archive from that link in case it's giving you problems.
It's a little humorous now but a that point I had 13 members and 107 posts. Even funnier than that is what eventually became the coal forum is listed as a forum for my old coaldelivery.com site and it has one post....by me. 2 of the members were me, another 2 were my brother and his wife and one of their friends. The rest were a few that came over from another forum to say hi. In other words I didn't have anything and probably 90% of those posts were by me.
Producing an active forum is no small task, there's literally hundreds of them created and removed each day. It's even harder when you try to do a general forum such as the one I was trying to launch. As time progressed the forum received very little attention and six months later in April of 2005 I was still in the same boat as in October. I had gone from 105 posts to 150 and again most of them were by myself. Membership had increased to about 50 but no one was posting. In August of 2005 Katrina hit and I started to see some activity as people sought alternatives for fuel because of the increased fuel prices. By January of 2006 total topics in the "Coal Forum" reached an astounding 205 which had 1500 posts.
http://web.archive.org/web/200601270223 ... al.com/bb/
The rest is pretty much history as I've seen increases in usage each year and have slowly gained a lot of regulars. The other forums were removed as I concentrated on the coal aspect as that was the only thing really getting attention. Eventually the forum progressed enough that it deserved its own domain and it was moved to nepacrosssroads.com in May of 2008.
Now that you know the history of the forum back to the new forums. I wish to return to what I originally wanted to do with this forum and have a general forum for everyone. That's why the recent change in the main logo and the expansion of the Classifieds and some other sections over the summer , for lack of better way to put it I want to shed the "it's a coal forum" perception and move onto expanding it into other areas and the latest addition of these new forums is the final step in that process. Keep in mind the coal sections will always be the heart and soul of NEPA Crossroads, they aren't going anywhere.
Onto to the new forums... The new Your Community forums will be divided by states. States will be divided into regions as needed in the future or as requested, they could be drilled down to cities/towns if there is a need. These forums can be used for anything whether it's local politics, national politics, just looking for some information in your area even if it's about coal or if you want to discuss the recent arrest of the dog catcher on bribery charges. The idea is instead of dividing by a category it will be divided by geography so you can connect to people who live near you. I have not added all the states but instead most in the Northeast US. If you do not see your state here and want it added let me know and I'll add it. The following states have been added so far.
If you want to help out what you can do is tell your friends neighbors about this wonderful new place you can discuss things locally. I'll be adding new moderators for these forums and you will need to reside in the state to moderate that forum or region if if its divided into a region. If you are interested in moderating one of these local forums let me know and I'll consider it, long term members will be considered first and if you are really new you probably shouldn't ask. I'll also take requests for the addition of regions or even for your local town if you think there might be enough interest in it.
Just a WAG but I don't recall seeing too many of us so far although I do know there are people in my town that burn coal.
