Our IndyDDR Identities

[Ho]

So many people here haven't changed their forum avatar here in years--myself included! I'm not even sure how long I've been using this avatar. I certainly didn't think it was going to be permanent when I first started using it, but I'm pretty remiss to change it at this point.

Now...I'm not saying that any of us need to change our avatars. Heck, I might not even recognize people if they did!

But this post is also a way of noting that we're now (over) 9 years out from "The Great Reset." And that's why the poll options stop at 9 years. Crazy.

[Ho]

I've been using this avatar so long that I couldn't even remember when I started using it. I had check the Internet Archive to see when this one first showed up. It looks like it was sometime between March 27 and April 21...2008. I guess since it's August now, I'll call that "sometime in the last 7 years."

[Riot]

I have posted on IndyDDR from probably like 2002 or 2003 on. That is almost half of my life ish! I am 27 years young at this very moment. I used to be such an impressionable young troll.

[MonMotha]

I think mine's at least that old. I want to say I created it (from a recording of an actual on-air broadcast of the corresponding TV episode, though it was probably a rerun) in late-2005. It's probably only the second or maybe third avatar I've had since the great reset. I remember having to override some things to allow myself to use it as it was deemed too large by the board settings in place at the time.

[Merk]

I am very much against changing avatars because that's honest to God how I identify posters and because there is oftentimes a post or two regarding someone's avatar that immediately gets invalidated when said avatar changes. I always get confused when Riot or Potter changes their avatar!

With that being said this is my second avatar and I believe it was made by lgolem back in the day. I recorded the video of Chad banging the machine back in the fall of 2004 I think and it became my avatar probably a few months after that. According to the Internet Archive I had this avatar has of 2/3/2005 which is right when the new forums started back up again. I can't grab my avatar from pre-reset by using the Internet Archive but it was a grainy photo of me that I cropped from a photobomb I did back in high school before photobombs had a name in today's lexicon.

I guess I have always had a thing for grainy avatars!


Were posts migrated to the new forums after the reset? My profile on 2/3/2005 shows that I had 430 posts and I definitely didn't write 430 got dang posts one day after the forums reset! https://web.archive.org/web/20070309100 ... 9e7dcf4dd3

[Ho]

I remember having to override some things to allow myself to use it as it was deemed too large by the board settings in place at the time.

Mine is similarly over the allowable size. I don't think I ever changed those settings, so our avatars are probably still over the limit. Of course I think you can argue that those limits have become over-conservative in the intervening 9 years.

I am very much against changing avatars because that's honest to God how I identify posters and because there is oftentimes a post or two regarding someone's avatar that immediately gets invalidated when said avatar changes. I always get confused when Riot or Potter changes their avatar!

I start identifying posters by their avatar, too. I wouldn't say it confuses me when they change, but it definitely takes me a bit to adjust.

Were posts migrated to the new forums after the reset? My profile on 2/3/2005 shows that I had 430 posts and I definitely didn't write 430 got dang posts one day after the forums reset! https://web.archive.org/web/20070309100 ... 9e7dcf4dd3

I don't remember anymore. Maybe?

I don't think so though. Part of the point of the reset was to try and put an ed to all the flame wars and general negativity that was going on at the time. I don't think I would have chosen to keep that around and it's never been my practice to editorialize by selecting what to keep and what to toss. Plus, as I recall, everyone had to re-register after the reset. So, even if the posts had stuck around, they wouldn't have been attached to your account. Nope...I think that's just an Internet Archive oddity.

[MonMotha]

The great reset was in fact a total reset. Everybody had to re-register, and no posts were migrated.

The upgrade to phpBB 3, which is when all the IndyDDR-specific "features" disappeared, was an in-place upgrade, and posts were retained. I don't think the forums have even been pruned since the great reset.

[Ho]

Nope. They haven't.

I used to prune the old pre-reset forums because space was at a premium on our old host. But when we migrated to the space that AtomX provided during the reset, he was able to provide ample space to be able to keep everything. I think I had to ask him to make extra room once...maybe twice. And now on the new host, we have even more space. Disk space has gotten really cheap in the last 10 years and hosts give it away like candy.

Mmm...candy.

[Merk]

How much space have we used and how much is left?!

[Ho]

Heh. It looks like we're using 3 GB ... of 100 GB. The forums are about 150 MB of that. My how times have changed when I used to prune to reclaim a few meg and now I've got 97 gigs free.

I'm actually probably using less space at the moment since I didn't migrate the videos to the new host (yet?). Also, all the videos that were in the photo archives got moved off to YouTube and are no longer being stored within the site content. However, I did increase the resolution of all the photos, so those are taking more space.

I don't know how that balanced with the removal of the video content. The videos were pretty severely compressed and the resolution bump was pretty substantial across 1000s of pictures. But, at any rate, we've got plenty of room to grow.

[Fluffyumpkins]

I feel like I've had mine for a while, but I'm really not sure.

I want to say this was my old GIF, but a slower moving version of it.

[Merk]

I can't remember a time when Fluffyumpkins did not have the little LAB guy forever-running from post to post.

[Amp Divorax]

My avatar pre-dates IndyDDR itself as I used it in other forums in 2004. I've contemplated retiring it earlier this year, but I'm not sure.

[MonMotha]

IndyDDR is definitely older than 2004. Heck, late 2004/early 2005 was "the great reset".

[Ho]

Yeah. IndyDDR goes all the way back to 2001. We are in year 14 here, folks.