History 14

[jinks]

Back in October, we moved Sawatdee-Gay-Thailand.com over to SawatdeeNetwork.com to finally get around the service provider bans in Thailand. The Board will always have a connection to Sawatdee Gay Thailand, as it was the domain name that elephantspike moved the Board to after leaving EZBoard. There is an enormous amount of history stored in the many posts over the years on this Board that is an active library for so many topics, given the search engineтАЩs capabilities and the amount of time a member might want to go through it or to reminisce on a certain event.

Where did Gay Message Boards begin and what was their original purpose? One of the first pioneers of the idea was Dr. Allen R. Briggs who started the PattayaGay report back in 1996. Allen had been a pillar of the Pattaya Community for many, many years and has tirelessly created the Weekly Report updating important happenings in the gay Pattaya Community. His report was read far and wide around the globe and provided long-distance viewers with a chance to live in Thailand vicariously, while also providing local Ex-Pats with much needed quality information.This later became the PattayaGay website with a message board attached to the site.

Smiles opened up the Sawatdee Forum with EZBoard back in 2003 and the PattayaGay Board and the Sawatdee Forum operated in harmony until Allen Briggs closed the old PattayaGay Board down. Elephantspike took over Sawatdee Forum in 2005 and initially kept it running on the EZ Board system until switching over to phpbb on December 31 of 2008 with the domain name Sawatdee-Gay-Thailand.com.

We may be the Sawatdee Network today, in order to promote, support or host whatever local talent we can in order to bring you more information and to stay currentтАжbut we will always be Sawatdee in appreciation of our beginnings with Smiles and elephantspike and of course all the members that have belonged and posted to Sawatdee over the years. And with this, we hope to continue with what the PattayaGay report started for us and the internet has continued to do for Sawatdee and thatтАЩs keeping people informed, connected and engaged about the happenings in Thailand.

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[jinks]

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one of the clearer logos, before "what's that clutter" appeared.

[elephantspike]

One slight factual correction: Actually it was still 2005 when we changed to PhpBB software on the sawatdee-gay-thailand.com domain from the EZBoard site. I think December 31, 2008 was around when we did the software upgrade from PhpBB 2.X to PhpBB 3.X. That was the previous huge upgrade before the latest one with the Wordpress network front page.

[jinks]

Exact dates are not important.

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THIS IS IT FOR YOU

[Smiles]

Nice little history jinks, and thanks for thinking to put up a post about it.
I know you and I have had our, shall I say, 'negative' moments over the years (and the one and only subject of the negativity was moderation philosophy, which jinks and I do not see eye to eye over), but you have made me laugh more often than not, and we have had good conversation moments over booze-or-breakfast, in Jomtien.

One board missing in this small history is DreadNed's original board ... a place ~ in the late 1990's/early 2000's ~ was where many of the long term members of Sawatdee started posting in the first place.
If the Members here think Sawatdee is 'edgy' and sometimes out-of-control, you haven't read the wild-west stuff which was posted there!
The loss of Dreaded Ned's message board (both the original board and it's short-lived predecessor) ... and close-on thereafter, the demise of PattayaGay, were actually the fundamental reasons why I started Sawatdee.

For the record: the original name of the EZboard version of Sawatdee was 'Sawatdee Forum'. That first board was spare and simple with no advertising: rather like GayButton board today. When Elephantspike took it over from me his vision of the board was much more forward-looking than mine ... i.e. to remake it into at least somewhat of a money maker. More power to him ... and thus the name was changed to Sawatdee Gay Thailand to, at the very least, take advantage of the powerful 'surfing' qualities of the big new browsers such as Google.

[Surfcrest]

The three of you guys have made the Board we all are enjoying today, happen for us. I can appreciate now, how much work it is to keep everything going behind the scenes...not just the tough day to day decisions, but continually working to make it better.

Some of our current membership goes back to the very early days, not only for Sawatdee, but to the very early Boards. Some of these members are still known by the same original handles, while others have had to re-register and come back. It would be great to hear about some of the early history from those original members.

Surfcrest

[PeterUK]

A few scattered thoughts. The dreadedned board was the first gay board I was aware of. That kind of thing was new then and I had a lot of fun reading it each day and contributing. Subjects that now seem old hat to many of us were fresh and thought-provoking then and there were long threads about whether bar boys were just in it for the money, for instance. An article called 'The Wallet' led to one such long and heated discussion I recall. It's a mistake to look back to 'the old days' of gay boards with rose-tinted spectacles - there were witty and amusing and interesting contributors, but just as many abusive and disruptive ones as now. That's the nature of the internet. Certainly in the early days of the dreadedned board it was not even necessary to sign in using a password; it was possible to sign in as another poster and put words in his mouth - you can imagine the mayhem that that made possible. In the end I think the Australian (?) board owner got fed up with all the hassles and ended it - and of course others sprang up. I met several people in 'real life' after first encountering them on gay message boards. Sometimes it didn't work out but I made two lasting and valuable friendships that way.