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guitaristjon22 said:
AN 8 am beer toast for the shroomery cheers

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Learyfan said:
Ythan, could you please recount, step by step, the day that The Shroomery went online and the work you put into it in the days leading up to the launch?  I'm sure we'd all love to hear it.

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Oh shit thanks for posting man, I totally would have missed this anniversary if someone hadn't pointed it out. I've been sidetracked and this morning has been particularly crazy. But yeah, wow, 15 years! Sort of makes me feel old, but I guess that's kind of an unavoidable consequence of actually getting old hehe.

So yeah my memory about starting the site is not super-clear, since it was such a long time ago, but I remember a few things. It was the summer after my freshman year of high school and I had only tried mushrooms once at the time. Our original address was http://www.drh.net/shroomery, and I mailed in $45 in cash for three months of hosting since I didn't have a credit card. Back then I used lycaeum.org a lot, and admired it. I wanted to make a version of Lycaeum that was focused just on mushrooms. My dream was to someday be as successful as they were. Now we have a million unique visitors a month, and they're offline. It's kind of bitter sweet.

Before starting the Shroomery I had a site called Soul Coughing Underground, so I wasn't completely new to web design. But things were so super basic then. I didn't know anything about web scripting. PHP was brand new. The most dynamic part of the site was the javascript on the main page that would say "good morning", "good afternoon" or "good evening" based on your system clock. And I think I might have ripped that from an example somewhere. When someone wanted to add a trip report, they filled out a form that sent it to my e-mail, then I coded up the web page and uploaded it by hand. There was no message board. There were no user accounts. The site was laid out using three frames and was blindingly bright red, blue, and yellow. We had a picture of Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes as one of the navigation images, and an M.C. Escher mantis for another one. Both scanned with my (dad's) super-cool cutting-edge SCSI flatbed scanner - there was no Google Image Search or anything like that.

At some point we moved off drh.net and on to http://shroomery.lycaeum.org. There's a whole crazy story there, where they threatened the site for copyright infringement, but then after public outcry they changed their mind and hosted us for free. Eventually we moved to our own server and became shroomery.org. We didn't register .com or .net for a while, but it was no big deal because domains were like $100/year back then and there weren't really any domain squatters.

We hacked in a few little Perl scripts and a very basic message board from Matt's Script Archive, but we didn't really embrace the whole dynamic site thing until another admin, Aphex, moved us to Windows NT Server with IIS, ASP, and MS Access for the database. That's when I started to learn about web development in earnest, and the switch to Linux, PHP and MySQL later on was relatively painless since it was conceptually similar (it also helped that Aphex did most of the work hehe).

I remember setting up the chat room, and idling in there for hours waiting for another person to join. I remember when I recognized every member of the site, and was psyched when I'd see a new person start posting. I remember when we had a shitty hit counter on the main page, and when it broke because we were getting too many visitors at once. Back then I was upset we had lost our count; now I see it as a milestone all its own. I remember when two members who met on the site got married. I remember when Pnut shot himself and ripper OD'd. I remember a lot.

But I don't want to ramble though, I'm not sure how much of this is really interesting to other people. However, if anyone is curious, we do still have the original news archives from when the site was founded. Cheers everybody, and I'm looking forward to bumping this post in 2027.

I did some snooping and found something interesting.

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Ythan said:
Back, but back very temporarily....I got suspended from school for smoking pot, but I may have returned there by the time you read this. I'll be going back sometime tomorrow (Sunday the 26th). I _will_ be at tonight's chat, however, so stop in and chill.
-Y

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Stopwhispering said:
I believe this calls for mushroom cake.

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IT LOOKS SOOO REAL

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Ythan said:

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Learyfan said:
Ythan, could you please recount, step by step, the day that The Shroomery went online and the work you put into it in the days leading up to the launch?  I'm sure we'd all love to hear it.

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Oh shit thanks for posting man, I totally would have missed this anniversary if someone hadn't pointed it out. I've been sidetracked and this morning has been particularly crazy. But yeah, wow, 15 years! Sort of makes me feel old, but I guess that's kind of an unavoidable consequence of actually getting old hehe.

So yeah my memory about starting the site is not super-clear, since it was such a long time ago, but I remember a few things. It was the summer after my freshman year of high school and I had only tried mushrooms once at the time. Our original address was http://www.drh.net/shroomery, and I mailed in $45 in cash for three months of hosting since I didn't have a credit card. Back then I used lycaeum.org a lot, and admired it. I wanted to make a version of Lycaeum that was focused just on mushrooms. My dream was to someday be as successful as they were. Now we have a million unique visitors a month, and they're offline. It's kind of bitter sweet.

Before starting the Shroomery I had a site called Soul Coughing Underground, so I wasn't completely new to web design. But things were so super basic then. I didn't know anything about web scripting. PHP was brand new. The most dynamic part of the site was the javascript on the main page that would say "good morning", "good afternoon" or "good evening" based on your system clock. And I think I might have ripped that from an example somewhere. When someone wanted to add a trip report, they filled out a form that sent it to my e-mail, then I coded up the web page and uploaded it by hand. There was no message board. There were no user accounts. The site was laid out using three frames and was blindingly bright red, blue, and yellow. We had a picture of Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes as one of the navigation images, and an M.C. Escher mantis for another one. Both scanned with my (dad's) super-cool cutting-edge SCSI flatbed scanner - there was no Google Image Search or anything like that.

At some point we moved off drh.net and on to http://shroomery.lycaeum.org. There's a whole crazy story there, where they threatened the site for copyright infringement, but then after public outcry they changed their mind and hosted us for free. Eventually we moved to our own server and became shroomery.org. We didn't register .com or .net for a while, but it was no big deal because domains were like $100/year back then and there weren't really any domain squatters.

We hacked in a few little Perl scripts and a very basic message board from Matt's Script Archive, but we didn't really embrace the whole dynamic site thing until another admin, Aphex, moved us to Windows NT Server with IIS, ASP, and MS Access for the database. That's when I started to learn about web development in earnest, and the switch to Linux, PHP and MySQL later on was relatively painless since it was conceptually similar (it also helped that Aphex did most of the work hehe).

I remember setting up the chat room, and idling in there for hours waiting for another person to join. I remember when I recognized every member of the site, and was psyched when I'd see a new person start posting. I remember when we had a shitty hit counter on the main page, and when it broke because we were getting too many visitors at once. Back then I was upset we had lost our count; now I see it as a milestone all its own. I remember when two members who met on the site got married. I remember when Pnut shot himself and ripper OD'd. I remember a lot.

But I don't want to ramble though, I'm not sure how much of this is really interesting to other people. However, if anyone is curious, we do still have the original news archives from when the site was founded. Cheers everybody, and I'm looking forward to bumping this post in 2027.

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Its Pat said:
I've been here for everyone of those years.  Think I am the oldest member still posting on a daily bases.  Sure I've had my sabbaticals but I'm still here you bastards.

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Don`t worry Pat, alot of us are still here, just hiding in the vets lounge.  I`m here almost everyday, I`m just older and quieter now.  No post whoring for me anymore   Also, wow has the pub gotten busy!

Ythan, thanks for the story! So many things have happened here in the last 15 years, its amazing when you realize that its all in the interwebs.  Thanks for creating my home away from home and giving us all the opportunity for so many of our paths to cross.