Hi All, and specially "Administrator" and "Moderators" I have looked at some infos on the forum about the history of this marvelous site, but could not find a general presentation. I have seen that some threads are dated as early as 1999 by Kwun and Cheung, but then the posts numbers for these gents were already in the thousands! And no wiki page to present BC! Like it is not important! Don't you find this scandalous? May be there should be a thread to tell how it all started
You'll have to wait till Kwun recovers from his late nights over the Indonesian Open. LOL The end of the year should see BC's 14th birthday! Wow Here is something brief. Back in those primitive days of 1998, there were two badminton forums (or rather bulletin boards) and mainly one badminton website. http://www.worldbadminton.com/ was a great resource in those days and it used to get the reports from the IBF of current tournaments. Around that time, the two english language badminton forums were Harvard badminton club and Northwest badminton. I can't remember which club the Northwest badminton was associated with (Northwest USA to clarify). There was a chinese badminton forum in existence at the time as well. Harvard badminton forum had the main traffic but still, it wasn't that busy. After all, not many people could watch badminton on TV and there was no such thing as video on the web. There was a stringing query on the Harvard forum. The user, lived in Pittsburgh, had got his racquet back from a stringer there and though it looked a bit funny. So a guy from HK (who happened to have strung his own racquets before) replied and managed to correctly diagnose the problem. I can recall it was the oval racquet era and the stringer should have missed the grommet when doing the vertical strings. The Pittsburgh guy was a dabhand at IT amongst his many talents and the scene was set. I am told that Pittsburgh is not the most welcoming of places especially in the winter. Those conditions provided an ideal gestational environment for a new badminton website called badmintoncentral.com (the registration date of the domain should be different to when the website actually came online). Included in badmintoncentral.com was badmintonforum.com. The web expanded and more users searching for badminton came on to the scene. The other badminton forums gradually became quieter. Come 2001, badmintonforum.com traffic was pretty healthy. As it got busier, subforums were added. Moderators were added to keep a perspective on the scene. Looking back, I think badmintonforum.com manages to keep going due to the efforts of the administrator and moderators. The community at large makes the biggest contribution of all by keeping tabs on trollers, flamers and those with a plain old nasty streak. International Badminton Federation (predecessor to the WBF) used to have a forum but without a moderating influence, juvenile characters gradually spoilt it. The badmintoncentral.com main page got hacked. So that's why we don't see it now. Maybe a metamorphosis will take place with it. Previously, the main traffic came from Singapore and Canada. In recent years, India has gone right up with the traffic.
Very interesting! BC grew very organically. I suppose the guy from HK was you? I welcome people' testimony!
i knew it i read it somewhere, here is more history. http://www.badmintoncentral.com/forums/showthread.php/12666-kwun?highlight=badmintonCentral
Well done. That's right. The Buffalo forum. haha. Couldn't remember the name just then due to the passgae of time. What's so interesting about history?
Cheung's account is pretty accurate! and not surprising as Cheung is instrumental to BC success being one of the early contributor and also being more enthusiastic with badminton as all of us here. the main and original goal of BC was to really put badminton on the internet. during the earlier days, i felt it was not fair when many other sports has their footprint already while badminton has only a handful. and esp lack of a place for badminton fans to hangout and chat. thus Badminton Central was born. initially it was really small, so small it ran out of my desk machine at school. but it grew steadily over the year organically. originally BC was run on this pretty rudimentary forum script. it worked because BC was still small. but later on it was obvious that we have started to outgrew the capability of the script. so a new software was installed in 2002. that's why you see that the original batch of members have a 2002 registration date. the actual server has also migrated over the years. from my desk machine to a tiny server at my (then) company's network, and then later on moved to a shared machine and then moving to a couple different dedicated servers. nowadays we are running a fairly speedy 8 core server and even that is starting to get stretched. in a community like BC, it is the people that counts, BC is just providing the platform. without you guys, BC is just a empty box. i think the best part of it all is how it brings people together. many friendships are forged via the connectivity of BC. which is the most wonderful thing.
"thank"ing of a post is limited to moderators. it is a special type of like, it shows our special appreciation to the post creator as we believe extra time and effort was made while creating the post, be it well thought out, or extra effort was made to collect, analyze data / information, etc. as a result, the post makes extra contribution to the BC community as a whole. (note that if you did spent a lot of effort creating a post but didn't get a thanks, that doesn't mean we don't value your post, it only means that the mods are only humans and we cannot possibly cover everything. )
