The phpbb forum I had on betaband.co.uk was getting hit so hard by spambots that I decided to delete it a while back… sorry about that. I may try and resurrect it at some point as read-only (or WordPress pages) – but in truth the last post was probably a few years ago anyway.
That got me thinking about the Old Jock Radio / Beta Board 2.0 forum that we used to have on the official site (betaband.com). I’ve just been browsing through archive.org’s WayBackMachine and although in most cases it hasn’t archived the actual posts, you can still see the layout, thread titles and usernames if you fancy a shot of nostalgia ;)
I wonder what happened to all those great people I used to hangout with on the forum – some of the usernames I’d totally forgotten about: crewe, PrfktTear, Mitch, lonely_minotaur, Tooth, BetaPompey, hercuteness, Arab, dianoia, J, AsianGirl, roo, stu, pigeonhair, Joanne, Adam etc. These were the days before Facebook/Twitter/YouTube – when there wasn’t as many places to kill time on the internet. There was also a “Beta Band Chat” mailing list that I think I set up — in fact it’s probably still going (?)
The URL of the forum if you remember was:
http://www.lab.artscience.net/clients/beta/yabb/YaBB.cgi/YaBB.cgi
So if you stick that URL the WayBackMachine you can see snapshots from Dec 2001 onwards
eg. 23rd Feb 2004 – “General Board”:
You can also see the (first page) of the thread that announced the Beta Band were splitting up
It’s actually kind of gutting but when ArtScience closed down the board they said they’d post me a backup copy. It turned out the CD-r they sent me was just an empty database file that didn’t contain any of the actual posts/threads etc. There was a crazy amount of info on the board like setlists, news, reviews, lyrics, tablature — I’m going to attempt to see what I can salvage from my own webpage backups and post it up on betaband.co.uk