OA origins/Favourite moments

Calum and Luca meltdown was good entertainment. Use too come from nowhere them.

I think OnlineArsenal would be no more, had we waited a few months longer with the Discourse transition.

During the final vBulletin weeks, Google had blacklisted us. Which meant that any Chrome user accessing OA would get a big red screen saying ‘Unsafe website, proceed with caution’. There was apparently a huge hole or backdoor in the vBulletin coding and to get rid of it we had to upgrade to an expensive enterprise package. Ridiculous.

OA was like the Titanic heading for the iceberg. Only for Discourse to show up like Superman and melt the ice with his laser beam.

Thank fuck that happened. Here we (still) are, 5 years later.

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The old OA was terrible on the mobile aswell. I think this is a much better forum on a mobile haha when I go on my laptop it doesn’t look as good at all

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I loved vBulletin. But discourse shits all over it.

Mobile usability is the main thing I love about Discourse. I think nowadays only like 30% of our traffic browses on desktop anyway.

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Yea 70/30 is the general split nowadays and growing ever wider the less time people spend in physical offices.

For example people like @Calum can now piss around on their phones a bit more than they could before due to not being in the office. :smiley:

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In the office I always preferred to keep my OA reading till my lunch break so I had stuff to read haha. Now because its home working and its a bit quieter I check it throughout the day :joy: It’s the same with the group chats on WhatsApp :rofl:

My posts have definitely went up ten fold since 23rd March as thats all you can do now ffs :joy:

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Holy fuck yes!!

I remember he used to really rub me up the wrong way, and we really got into it one time about something.

I remember being really uncomfortable getting into it with this guy who was clearly a respected member of the forum being staff and all but he was being such a fucking dick that I couldn’t leave it.

I can’t remember exactly what it was, but the thing that bugged me the most was that he got needlessly aggressive about something totally inconsequential and it struck me as really odd.

Glad I’m not the only that felt that way about him haha

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Haha, Maverick. That was an odd type. Dont remember he was a staff member during my time though. But what happened to IW? Did his passion died after Sara left? lol God, he had such a major crush on her. lol

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Ah good old days when the sighting of a female poster would equate to the discovery of your soulmate.

@DavidHillier is still stuck in that era

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I totally forgot about I_W, he was a really good guy too shame he doesn’t come around anymore. Him, TA6, Thomas89, Fabster, you, Gooner Wasp were some of the people I rememeber most prominently in the first couple years I was here.

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TA6 is still doing stuff behind the scenes. As I am. Not a regular poster but I do visit at least once a day.

As B|1ink says, vBulletin was heading in one direction which was completely unsustainable, we had someone hacking us every other week which I was trying to mitigate and the software was completely unstable.

I found discourse and although it was a difficult decision to make starting afresh it was probably the best decision for the good of the OA community. I love the mobile aspect of it and lets face it 75% of people visiting now use mobile. Yes we probably dont have the community features we used to have but that’s up to us to make the community stronger and have banter and fun on a platform that I know won’t go down every other day and has some lovely features and is relatively easy to manage.

Long live OA :slight_smile:

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I remember the whole hacking saga. Towards the end VB just became a pile of shit and I’m glad we made the move. I actually like the discourse board and it’s mobile reliability makes browsing and using OA so much more convenient.

Speaks volumes about the community we have here that we could move to a new board and start afresh and arguably be in as good a position in terms of activity as I can remember.

Good to see you pop in every now and then too mate :fist_left:t3:

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Anyone remember El Bee? What happened to her?

I think she is married to one of the posters.
I don’t know who but it’s definitely not @Hass

Married @TA-6

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The only feature I miss about the old forum is the games / arcade thing which allowed you to display your trophies if you had the top score.

I remember spending a depressing amount of time on this vegetable slicing game. Me and @Robin_L exchanged the trophy probably a dozen times before I achieved a truly unattainable score and kept that beautiful gold bastard for good. Seem to recall she had a shit load of other trophies though, but this was the one that mattered. The equivalent of the CL if you will.

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The helicopter game was so fucking annoying.

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Bringing some form of Arcade back to modern OA is on the backlog :slightly_smiling_face:

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Where’s my guy @JakeyBoy