ZooChat is 15 years old!

Simon Hampel

Simon Hampel

Administrator
Staff member
20+ year member
ZooChat was launched (originally as "ZooBeat") 15 years ago today - 19th October 2003 ... happy birthday!

We are currently just under 895,000 posts and have 5,400 active members.

"active" means they are valid accounts who are able to post if they choose - ie not banned/disabled/waiting for email activation/etc - and their email addresses are still valid (ie emails have not bounced back as undeliverable). We have actually had over 15,500 users register for the site - but that number will include spammers and users who are no longer active because they were either banned, or their emails bounce and so their accounts get deactivated.

I am really busy at the moment working on the upgrade to the next version of the forum software, which is a complete rewrite from the ground up - so all my customisations need to be rebuilt. But that's okay, because the new version is a great platform for developing new features and functionality on, so I'm looking forward to adding a lot of new stuff to the site in the next 12 months.

PS. new version supports unicode emojis, so the birthday cake emoji I tried to add to this post will actually work once I upgrade :D

I'll post some forum stats over the course of the day today.

Some history:

19 Oct 2003 first thread welcoming people to ZooChat: Welcome !

20 Oct 2008 announcement about the relaunch: Welcome to ZooChat!

21 Oct 2016 announcement about the relaunch: Welcome to the new ZooChat

23 Oct 2016 thread showing history of what the website looked like: Happy Birthday ZooChat

18 May 2017 last set of stats published: ZooChat has 800,000 posts and 9,700 members
 
Media comments per day - since launch (90 day moving average)

upload_2018-10-19_15-29-14.png

Notice the huge dropoff in comments in late 2016? That corresponds to the migration from vBulletin+PhotoPost to XenForo+Media Gallery.

Previously, we treated photos like threads and so comments were basically posts and showed up in a New Comments search (just like New Posts).

The version of the Media Gallery we current run does not support this - there is no way to see photos which have been commented on.

However the new version of XenForo we are migrating to in coming months will get us a bit closer to what we used to have. I still hope to make further improvements to the gallery to make it as usable as it was previously.
 
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