So many happy hours spent as a starry-eyed adolescent looking through the Windows 95 CD. 
I’m not sure how I found the site (maybe bored.com?) but I found it so amusing that I lost the better part of a day to reading the tickets and associated commentary, and afterwards was utterly compelled to join the forum. This was at the tail end of 2007, in the phpBB days I think - certainly before things went all Vanilla.
I’m going to put the exact date as March 4, 2001—that’s the date on the first bit of George feedback mail. I think I posted the link on alt.tech-support.recovery and the responses started coming pretty quick.
I should get some thoughts together about this and blog about it or something!
edit - All the original set of image files have modified-by dates of Feb 26, 2001, so that’s when they landed on the web server, at least. So it’s definitely around now, one way or the other!
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I remember at one point we had over 100 users logged in at once (with many of them actively posting) and that was pretty wild. Moderation was an actual task that took time and required coordinated coverage for a while.
Lots of weirdness over the years. The “Naked Pictures of Sked” (started by Heteroskedasticity) thread went on for dozens and dozens of pages and spawned a separate thread where some patient soul would summarize that week’s posting highlights just from that one thread.
That weird Sims thing.
A MUD.
No small number of gatherings over the years. We did a CA-to-TX road trip staying with and/or meeting internet strangers almost the whole way. Care packages, cards, and letters when I was in basic and later Afghanistan.
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Another thread just reminded me of this…how many remember the origin of “wave your hat”?
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Jawa was the origin of not a small number of CoG memes.
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I actually met Jawa one time when I was in Texas and he was not wearing a hat. I was disappointed to say the least.
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Hanging out with you & sig and jawa was fun, but man, that whole Dave & Busters meet was a weird encounter, and a very solid example of jawa being jawa. It started out with “i used my corporate discount to get us all a private party room with food!” and then it went to “well, the private room isn’t happening but I got us free admission and food” and then it went to “there isn’t free food” and from there to “and also there are no free tickets, we’re basically just going to D&B.”
I was supposed to meet him in Houston and he ghosted me, but not after sending a dozen confirmation emails and also keeping me updated with an actual series of phone calls on the day he was supposed to be arriving detailing his supposed travel progress. He simply never showed up at the meeting place and stopped answering his phone.
It kind of creeps me out that I had him stay in my house. Like, he was never anything but kind and compassionate in person. He never said or did anything to make me feel threatened in any way, never hinted at anything creepy, nothing like that. But there are just too many people who have posted here and elsewhere over the years about their own jawa encounters and who he apparently really is/was.
Definitely a wild chapter in CoG history.
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I remember that sometime in the mid 2000’s someone I worked with mentioned this crazy site about this site that outed a bunch of crazy tickets. I was developing a program for our bureau to handle all of our own tickets (using VB5 and MS Access!) and I had to check it out. I slowly made myself known on the site and cautiously joined with a few tentative posts until I was accepted as one of the group.
I hope I was accepted as one of the group and haven’t been merely tolerated all this time. #awkward
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There is no in-group–just a bunch of people awkwardly tolerating each other (and occasionally getting married).
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What I like about this group is the variety of people that are on here and the group is just the right size, and not too many people. Good signal to noise ratio.
On large forums you tend to get allsorts, and also lots of noise which’ll make the signal disappear (like trying to pick out Voyager’s signal from far away).
Also, nice not to have spammers and trolls, these are the bane of any forum.
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Wot? Haven’t they bestowed the Golden Order of George upon you yet? 
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Wait, what? There is an actual Golden Order of George??
Now that is so cool!!!
There is now, yes.
Edit: It should be apparent, after 20 freaking years, that I am perfectly willing to wield power capriciously.
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You did no such thing. You made 150 posts on your first day and we were all like “Who the hell is this ‘Rizak the Really Horrible’ guy?” 
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Obviously you remember it differently. My recollection is that I dipped a toe into the waters and slowly made myself and my quiet, passionate personality known by slow and deliberate personal interaction.
Yeah, I wasn’t there until a bit later, but having seen both of you, I’m inclined to believe @Force10 on that one.
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Y’know, that’s how I remembered it, too, but I am getting old and was fully prepared to be mistaken.
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Well then I guess we were lucky to not see what a full-on assault would have been! 
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