Ars Technica turns 20 years old, and we couldn’t have done it without the community

Enlarge / If that image doesn't quite get the point across, a lot of wild stuff happens in the Ars forums. (credit: Getty Images / Aurich Lawson)
If you've ever looked at the whois info for Ars Technica, you might already be in on a little secret: our birthday is December 29, 1998, making 2019 the site's official 20th anniversary year. For a site that wanted to do 'bad, bad things like NT, Linux, and BeOS content under the same roof,' that's an impressive run—about 7.5 million beats, or more than a lifetime in doge years.
As one of the longtime Arsians on present-day staff, I feel quite safe in saying that we wouldn't have made it this far if not for our community. I'm not talking so much about the people who just leave comments to articles we publish, although proud we are of all of them. No, I'm specifically referring to those of you who inhabit the OpenForum. This one's for all of you.
In the beginning, there was Caesar
Once upon a time, Web fora were a big thing, and the Ars OpenForum was one of the biggest. Sure, in the year 2018 they are a little slower moving than the olden days, but back then people didn't have some of those new upstarts like MySpace and app.net and Brightkite to draw away their attention. Forums overall may have slowly faded away, but not so around Ars. Even today, with all of those other distractions people have online, things aren't quite at ghost town level in the OpenForum. And when I put out the call for people's reminiscences, the memories came flooding in.
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