Complicated story. Indeed, Posting Up, the oldest precursor to D3boards.com, was started just prior to the 1998-99 season, my second season running D3hoops.com. The original board was on a piece of software called Discus, which was actually created at Hope College.
This board, 22 years ago, did not have the capacity to create multiple pages with posts, and if a page got to more than 30-40 posts, it would take forever to load, especially for dial-up users, which was how the majority of us connected. So, for a year or two, I had to manually trim posts from pages because of the limitation of the software, but eventually it became something that was built into the software that I could set the board to automatically trim a board from 40 posts back to 25.
In the summer of 1999, we started Post Patterns, which was the message board for D3football.com. It ran off another Discus install on the D3football.com server. These boards did not and could not talk to each other, and users had to register in both places.
This, by the way, was silly. But then again, a board with both of those sports on it at that time probably would have overwhelmed the servers we ran on back in the day.
By 2005, a lot of these things were changing. More people were on broadband. It was cheaper to host a website and the servers we ran on were also faster. Registering a new domain name was cheaper. And, also, Discus seemed to be maxing out its potential and wasn't getting new features. So I registered D3boards.com, set up a new server instance and found a piece of software which would take the data we had and start fresh. But when merging two instances of Discus into one, I had to choose which board was the primary one, in terms of which list of members I could bring in, and that was the hoops board, because it was older.
So, I was able to bring over the 40-some hoops posts that were on each board at that time in 2005 and those were the new posts on D3boards.com. Since each board's 40 old posts dated back differently than the rest, that's why the start date (date of the oldest post) is different for basketball boards, while all of the football conference boards start on Aug. 16, 2005.
Hoops posts from prior to 2005 actually
do count in a user's posting total, which I love.
You can find some old posts on the Wayback Machine/Internet Archive at archive.org. Here's a sample URL:
https://web.archive.org/web/19990210182339/http://www.d3hoops.com/discus/Archive.org doesn't include anywhere near all of the posts, however.
