Seeing Doreen's message commemorating this site's 7th Birthday, and looking in again after quite a long absence and finding things very different now from the way they used to be, I thought I'd add a couple of reminiscences of my own.

I became a member here just four months after it was first launched. Back then, the titles of all the threads on the site were on a single page, and any of them could be accessed by the single click of a mouse. Any thread which had 15 replies or 500 views was a "hot" thread, marked by a "flaming envelope" symbol in the margin.

It seemed astonishing to me then that a thread might ever get 500 views, and I was staggered when several did. It would have been inconceivable to any of us then that a thread might get 59,000 views, as some have done now.

As for getting 15 replies, some of the early ones languished at 7 or 8 for a while, and then disappeared. The concept of getting hundreds or even thousands of replies, as they do now, never occured to us.

I watched a rapid expansion of the site during the next 2 years. Finding threads, or even batches of them, became more difficult. The early Journals were something we could all read every day, but over time it became impossible to manage it because there were just too many.

Wa'il changed the layout, the format, the entire forum, ever expanding. Some of us became mentors and moderators, responsible for "covering" an area of the forum or an aspect of low carbing for which we had particular interest or expertise. On one of the new changes, it was suggested that members contribute book reviews as a reference service to members who want to be pointed in a particular direction to learn more, or to find out what a certain book is about whose name they have come across. I did 4 of these book reviews, including the one on Atkins. Needless to say, the exercise was extremely educational to me, as well as hopefully being useful to others.

I don't have much new to offer now, but the founders are still putting vast amounts of time into the forum, and racking up incredible numbers of posts. There are still many people logging in and being supported, from a very wide "catchment area" involving continents as well as many countries. People will continue to benefit from this site for a long time to come.

Do I think the efforts of the founders were worthwhile? You bet I do. And should Doreen commemorate their achievement? You bet she should.

I said this several pages ago, but I still mean it now. Congratulations to the founders, thank you for creating this site, and best wishes for the future.

Andy