Well here is the history as far as I can remember it. (I am old you know!)
When I first started in the IT world, I knew a great deal (atleast I thought I did) about desktops in a stand alone environment. However, once I got a job as a tech, I wanted to know everything as far as IT goes. My first challenge was to get two PCs to share information with each other. I read and I read and I read. I got 95% of it figured out but could not grasp what was needed to finally make it happen. A friend of mine who spent 2 years in technical schooling walked by and I asked him what was going wrong. He couldn't answer me with a certainty. So I posted my question on a website and the next day I had the answer. And it worked! So that's when I decided I needed a place where people could share real life answers to these kind of questions. So the idea was born.
Now all I needed to do is learn how to create a website with forums and how to host it. Reading more websites I found out how to create such a site. I had made friends with someone online in Texas who said they could let me use their server to host my site. So now I created technicalforums.com because that was the name of the site he already owned and wasn't using.
Of course since I was very new to all of this, the site had little traffic. In fact, the only people who signed up to join the site were people I knew who I coaxed into it.
After a year of existing there, I was informed that the server was being taken offline and I would lose my hosting and the site name. I was bummed, but not ready to quit. So I found another friend who said he would host the site for me. I can't remember who it was or what the url was, but it was something like
http://somehost.com/pctech.
Well that didn't last long. After 6 months the site hosting my site shut down. My friend could not be found. I had no backups of the site. I was done. I figured what I was doing didnt matter so why bother.
That's when my buddy was stepped in. He convinced me to keep going and offered to host us. So off I was to recreated pctech. This time the URL was
http://expertgamers.com/pctech. After finally getting it up and running they way I wanted it, I again spammed my friends to join.
However, I realized that I needed to think bigger if I wanted PCTech to be bigger. It was time we got our own domain name and host. So I invented
www.pctechforums.com and found us a host. That was in 2001. After 4 years I finally found a home.
In the years since that day, I have redesigned the site many times. We started on UBB. I liked that since it was easy and did just what I wanted it to. But after some time I wanted to do more, like create how to's and mini news articles. That's when I discovered PHPNUKE. Unfortunately, when I migrated I lost all user information. But the only positive thing was that I had already lost that information when my host just vanished. In the years following moving to Nuke, I have had 2 different sets of forums installed. And this is where the UserID numbers come in.
One time when migrating because my host was going out of business, I had to manually copy each user from the old DB to the new. Since this was all new to me, I entered other users in first to test. Then I moved my account. That's why I a have a UserID of 34.
Now early this year I decided to leave Nuke and just stay with PHPBB. I lost no users during the move which was a relief.
Hopefully this answers your questions, but if you have any more, I will be happy to answer them.
