PSA: If you joined DU between 2001 and mid-2003, you now have a proper join date

[EarlG]

As mentioned in my anniversary thread last week, we have been working to assign join dates to members who joined prior to the launch of DU2 in mid-2003. The reason for this is that we will soon be starting a daily thread to celebrate DUers' anniversaries and posting milestones, and of course we didn't want to leave out our earliest members.

Elad has now completed the process of assigning join dates, so if you are a member who joined between 2001 and mid-2003, you can now see that date on your profile. Unfortunately, due to the way that we had to calculate these dates, we cannot guarantee that it is your exact join date -- however, rest assured that if it is not exactly correct, it is certainly within three or four days of the actual date. (Also note that everyone has a join time of 4:00AM -- we didn't calculate estimated times, so that was simply a side effect of the process of assigning dates.)

We're still testing to make sure the new daily thread works correctly, but we hope to have it up and running very soon.

Thanks for reading!



-- EarlG and Elad

[underpants]

1. I noticed that yesterday

Thanks. Sept 28th.

[WhiteTara]

2. This is so cool

Are you matching new names to old names/accounts? I changed my name twice.

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. Fri Oct 25, 2002. Cool!!

[UpInArms]

4. Thank you!

I thought I joined in February, but it was April ... good to know!

[Maeve]

5. Huh! I was sure I joined before October 2001!

Must have lurked longer than I thought I did... It was a rather long time ago...

However, I still claim that I am one of the DUers who got Skinner to add the blush smilie-- after I made a stupid mistake as a mod (but we won't go into that!)

Thanks for the extra effort, guys!

[hlthe2b]

50. Me too. I lurked beginning inauguration day, 2001, but didn't register until July, 01...

So very like me to "check it out" first, I guess.

[Skittles]

6. exactly one month before 9/11

At 3:00 AM

Cool!

[griffi94]

21. Hi Skittles

My join date is July 14 2002 at 4:00 AM.

I didn't sleep much during the Bush presidency. Lol

[Gore1FL]

43. You had a Mint Skittles picture. nt

[Native]

7. Cool. And I appreciate the explanation regarding the 4:00 a.m. time stamp!

May I ask why you chose 4:00 a.m.?

[EarlG]

9. I actually didn't ask

My guess is that it's something to do with the time actually being assigned as 12:00 UTC, but Elad is on the West Coast so it ended up displaying as 8 hours behind. I didn't think the time was too important -- the date was what we were going for.

[Native]

10. Gotcha. That makes sense.

[Native]

11. Can the old guard now get something special like a differently colored star?

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

8. Cool!

Except my join time is 1:00am! But who cares? Been fun to be here almost 20 years!

[efhmc]

12. I was wondering about that time. I guess it says 3am and not 4am because of CST?

Sun Nov 3, 2002, 03:00 AM

[murielm99]

33. Mine says Nov. 10, 2003,

but I lurked for a full year before joining.

I have always been a star member. I recommend it.

[comradebillyboy]

13. May 28 2001 for me...

[Binkie The Clown]

14. I did. BUT I had to re-join with a new name when I changed emails and lost my password.

I joined during the Howard Dean campaign. As for join date, it really doesn't matter, does it? We're here now and that's the most important thing.

[SalviaBlue]

31. Same

[ProfessorPlum]

15. Thank you!

Looks like I joined on the day after 9/11. That doesn't surprise me.

[stopbush]

16. Mine is off by two years.

I definitely joined in 2001, not 2003.

[EarlG]

18. Different account maybe?

User ids are given out incrementally, and your user id is 127665. The last user ids of 2001 are around the 108200 range, which means the stopbush account couldn't have been created in 2001...

[stopbush]

48. No. Same moniker I started with.

DU and Smirking Chimp were the places I sought refuge after W was installed by the SCOTUS, and IIRC, it was very early on in his reign of error.

[lamp_shade]

17. October 5, 2003. Yikes!

[sueh]

19. Cool! Thank you!

[KG]

20. woohoo. thanks.

forgot when it was - Thu Aug 23, 2001,

I was aware when DU was launched. it was awhile before I took the message board plunge

[90-percent]

22. I joined some time after bush v. gore and well before 9-11.

Here's a comment from my profile back when we had to rejoin or something long time ago:

'Gee - my profile info didn't migrate from the old DU I guess? "

DU sez mt life here started 2004 but i think i was here since 2001?

i like to think i got in early on, but the current du info on me doesn't reflect that.

FWIW

-90% jimmy

[EarlG]

23. See post 18 above

In this case your user id is 146575, which would put you in 2004.

[90-percent]

25. well, my du life prior to 2004

is lost to history. so be it. minor compared to everything else i've lost in my life the last ten or 20 years.

thanks for looking into it.


-jim

[Dukkha]

24. Member since: Wed Sep 5, 2001, 04:00 AM

I must have had insomnia that night and found DU.

[Dem2theMax]

26. Since you guys have such awesome power,

I don't suppose you could change my birthdate and make me younger?

[Happyhippychick]

27. How fun!

[judesedit]

28. Well, Earl, mine says 2008. It's very incorrect. I've been coming here since the beginning. I may

not have been a star member before 2008, though. I started going to Huff Post, Alternet, Brad Blog, and every liberal site I could find during the Bush debacle in 2000. I was an avid Air America fan and as soon as Democratic Underground started it became my go to site. I preferred DU's formatting compared to the other sites. Although huffpost was good back then, too. Just curious how you determine the start date????

I've also served on the jury quite a few times and I see it says "No" on my profile???

[EarlG]

35. It's based on when your account was created

We have an accurate record of everybody’s join date since mid-2003. This fix — based on user id numbers —only affects accounts that were created before that.

If your profile says you’re not willing to serve on Juries, but you want to, click the My Account link at the top of the page and scroll down to the Preferences section. Check the “Willingness to serve on Juries” option.

[judesedit]

42. I've served on your jury many times. That is what's very weird.

I guess my feelings are just hurt cause I'm not remembered. lol. Thanks for responding.

[EarlG]

46. What probably happened is

at some point you meant to click “not now” on a Jury request, and you accidentally clicked the “don’t ask me again” button, which resets the preference to “unwilling.” It happens from time to time.

[judesedit]

47. Gotcha. Thanx!

[Reader Rabbit]

29. Fri Jul 25, 2003

I know I found DU right after the selection in 2000, but I must have lurked for a long time before officially joining.

Dayum, it's been a long time!

[AllaN01Bear]

30. mine says 2016, but we all had to re do our passwords and usernames in the

fallout after the infamous hack of 2016.

[EarlG]

39. Passwords had to be changed but

account creation dates weren’t affected.

[AllaN01Bear]

45. thanks for your information.

[colorado_ufo]

32. Awesome! Thank you!

[slater71]

34. Thank you Earl. Great job and thanks for your hard work.

[judesedit]

36. My username has always been the same. My password had to be

changed at least once, though. And I've had a few email and physical addresses since the beginning. Democratic Underground saved my sanity during the 2000 Bush installation. Anyway, thanks for being there then and being here now. I've spent many anxious days and sleepless nights on your site, sometimes coming here, literally, a hundred times a day, I'll bet. No kidding. DU's the best!

[LiberalFighter]

37. I noticed. Thanks

[Mrs. Overall]

38. Yay! Thank you! March 30, 2003!

DU has helped me get through some rough political times in the last 18 years!

[aquamarina]

40. March 31, 2002.

Nearly 19 years. Can’t believe how the time has flown by.

[Gore1FL]

41. Cool!

I know the month and the year, so your +/- 4 days is better than I can do!

[aggiesal]

44. Member since: Wed Nov 10, 2004, 12:27 PM. n/t

[MuseRider]

49. Late to reply but THANK YOU!

In the long run it does not mean much to anyone but those of us who have kinda wanted to know. I knew around the time because it was right before my brother got sick, disappeared then showed up at my house and died. Bad time and DU actually helped me through it. I don't think I posted much until the next year when all that was over but this site gave me a really wonderful escape, and education, when I needed it more than ever.

Thank you for being there and still being here. You guys are doing great and I hope Skinner is somewhere being happy.

[ForrestGump]

51. Been a few changes around here

I just noticed the start date on my profile when I logged in for the first time since I-don't-know-when. I thought I joined earlier than 2003, but it's been so many years now that I have no real idea. I don't know when was the last time I logged on, but it must've been years rather than months and I don't think I've been active here in over a decade.

So many changes in that time. In my life and in the lives of people I know, of course -- lost touch with the cohort of people I knew here on DU (an abusive ex-fiancee who sent every female I've ever known in my life, almost all 100% platonically, breakup letters on my unknowing behalf didn't help, and I think she zapped most of the people I knew on DU) -- but certainly huge changes in the tech of this whole Internet thing and, most definitely, the political and social sides of things.

Back in the years of the Cheney junta it would have been impossible to imagine that we might one day look back upon those days as, if not quite exactly the Good Old Days, at least marginally better. To be vaguely noaztgic for 'W' is just a very weird feeling, and certain;y a potent indicator of just how badly things unraveled in the past few years. At least Cheney and the Neocon Horde knew the rules of the game, even if they flagrantly broke them in broad daylight; at the very least, as much as I despised all of them, including Junior, they now represent a case of "it could have been worse." To me, though, that was still pretty much the end of the US, in some meaningful ways, a process set in motion in earnest during Reagan but arguably going back to at least the killing of JFK and probably 30 years or more before that, in some ways.

President Obama fought a valiant rearguard action, against horrendous obstruction from a hostile Republican Congress, but was essentially doing well just to tread water and ameliorate what damage he could and then the American electorate (almost predictably, at this point) voted in the obviously inept and unsuited Trump and his bunch of pirates, the mopping-up operation following on from Cheney and indulging in even more rampant and blatant criminality while all but burning the US to the ground. Now we've got to fix it again, and even though the Manchurian Cantaloupe is in exile we're stuck with his knuckledragging cultists, who are absolutely mindnumbingly removed from any semblance of objective reality or rationality. Hopefully the worst of the damage can be addressed within Biden's first term so that we might finally get on with actually PROGRESSING as a nation (that is, of course, unless the ubiquitous American Idiots don't vote again for a moron or for an incipient fascist autocrat, this time probably a much smoother and smarter one).

DU was certainly valuable to me in helping me to know what was going on in the Cheney years and into the Obama presidency. It's good to sign in again and I'm sure I'll be back from time to time. Good to see that it's still up and thriving.

[samnsara]

52. yay to all you old timers! The only forum Ive been in that long is the golden retriever forum

...i joined in 1997. Lots of changes with the members all this time.

[Cha]

53. Oh wow.. glad I finally saw this!

How did you dig that up..? lol

I thought I joined at the end of September 2002.. I guess my memory was faulty since you have July 7, 2002.

Must have been a good day 'cause I'm still here.

[ThirdEye]

54. Neat. Mon Aug 6, 2001, 04:00 AM

What was I doing up at 4:00am?!