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I didn't even get in apparently my email address was not acceptable !!!???

fixer wrote:I didn't even get in apparently my email address was not acceptable !!!???

Reg, Curtis never kept pace with the rapid development of the web and web based communications. He still thinks everyone pays a big name ISP to provider for a land based connection to your single desktop device. He was stuck in the 1990's as far as thinking about how people access the Intranet & Web.

With that mind set governing membership, all of my adult children and many of my friends do not have an email address that he approved of and thus could never join. Just another brick in the wall that spelled the end for the mcch.

I remember when America Online transitioned to a fee free provider. Suddenly, anyone could get an AOL email account. Curtis quickly moved to ban AOL addresses from being acceptable. With one key stroke he blocked out his two Super Administrators; Jim G. and myself. He had to come up with a complicated work around to fix that and it cost him more members.

He had a hundred or so words on his auto censor list.
An army of nearly 75 moderators in the hay days.
A ten page list of rules.
A couple of over zealous moderators running all around the forums editing posts and deleting posts of anything they remotely thought to be close to a rule violation.
...and god help the mcch if someone tried to join with a gmail or AOL address, he must have thought the world would end!

Well I use am AOL account as my main one and have a Gmail one that is on my mobile for apps and stuff like that, he must have had a seizure when I tried to join with both addresses

I wasn't aware, although I should have guessed, that he wasn't very familiar with computers and software... It does explain A LOT of things !

THe MCH used to be a huge knowledge base and I enjoyed been there in the early days. If I remember right, it was in the late 90s/early 2000s owned by Marc Bousquet. I do not remember if the forum had the same name, but I remember that Mark took over. The loss of all those years of information in the late 2000s really hit the site and the slow downfall began.

I also remember that as soon as I joined the board as the owner of the Vintage Lesney Online site, Mark gave me "Moderator" privileges, which I never asked for and never used.

I was probably crazy one day : I saw something very unusual on eBay (could remember what exactly!) and I posted a new thread "Did somebody saw this model" with the eBay link. God, did I hear about it! The worst part was that other moderators sent me very rude messages. I was not banned, but it probably came close. I knew it was again their "rules", but I just did not think about it.

Anyway...

Pat

Pat, if I remember correctly that was something like the old "Inside the Net" or some similar name which was a platform for various different Bullet Boards. Back in the 1990's many large ISP providers diversified and began to offer much more than email and an Internet gateway.

ISP's offered chat rooms for live chat, some offered a Bulletin Board area for member created discussion topics and other areas of possible interest. Many also offered free server space for your own personal web site. Smaller less expensive ISP's did not offer a news reader platform while the larger companies did. In those days an ISP also offered free access to the Usenet where one could find hundreds and hundreds of BBS (Bulletin Boards) which were the fore runner to today's Web based discussion forums like the VBD (and the mcch). See a brief explanation of the Usenet at the bottom of the page.

All that came to an end for the various large ISP's at the end of the 1990's and beginning of the 2000's. No more hosting of Bulletin "Board style forums, no more free server space for your web page and no more free access to the Usenet. There were technical and financial reasons for that major change which are easily researched if anyone has further interest.

The online landscape was changing rapidly and many free personal web sites were going dark and discussion groups (Bulletin Boards) were ceasing to exist. Those (like myself) who preferred the Usenet bulletin boards over the smaller ISP BBS were cut off from access and had to pay a secondary monthly fee to regain access. This could sometimes double the cost of having Internet access. So, many abandoned the Usenet as a option for financial reasons.

After all this happened, Curtis rented some server space and put together a web based forum with some inexpensive software. He emailed old members of the now defunct ISP based BBS and asked them to come and post on his new "Forum."

In those days, membership was optional and anyone could post and read the forums. The forum was small by today's standards with regard to membership and discussion areas. Mark began to seek "donations" to help fund the server and to purchase better software. He also invited Charlie Mack to join and created the Charlie Mack forum.

Mark was beginning to have some success in raising money from his members and that brought about a clash with Charlie Mack. Curtis felt Charlie's already established commercial presence in the hobby with shows, books, his museum, newsletter and promotional items for sale dominated and overshadowed Mark's simple upstart mcch. So, Charlie was kicked out.

The rise of the mcch was based on several issues which all transpired around the same time: The end of Bulletin Boards on various ISP's, the loss of free access to the Usenet and the new availability of free email addresses and Internet access. People began to explore the web and see what else was out there.

The very name of Matchbox Collectors Community Hall was a wise one as it had three key words that would pick up a hit when someone was searching for Matchbox discussions and information. The site grew in membership and increasing numbers of readers who lurked. As a wider audience grew, so did spam and troll posts. The ability to post was changed to member's only.

It was at this time that Curtis made his rule about which ISP based email addresses were acceptable and which were not. This was an effort to further reduce spam and trolls. That rule would only be effective for a short period of time because of the rapid pace of developments in how we use and access the Internet and WWW. Almost overnight, the whole game changed once again.

That cheap forum software had little protection and all too soon the place was hacked and the hackers were using Curtis' rented server space to send out volumes of spam. He purchased new software and put everything back in place with a brand new look. The archive base was lost but it was only a couple years worth of archives.

The real tragic loss of many years worth of archives happened when Curtis himself deleted them. We'll never know the truth of how or why, but the deed was done and it had nothing to do with hackers.

What is also tragic is that he made the conscious decision to live off donated income which was supposed to support the continued operation cost of the site. Software upgrades were always long overdue and a struggle for him to implement. His own outdated OS on his own computer was always in conflict with the latest forum software. When you wait to upgrade and you end up skipping two or three previous upgrades, you have a much more difficult time of it.

He would seek free help from friends and students. That left him with such legacy's as his misspelled name of 'Administer" instead of Administrator and "Fourum" instead of Forum. It also created other problems that he could never resolve.

With the amount of income the site was generating in its peek years, Curtis could have paid for the server, the latest and greatest software, updated that software within days of each new release and paid a professional to handle all the site maintenance (i.e. a professional Web Master).

Usenet has significant cultural importance in the networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as "FAQ" and "spam".

The Usenet:
The format and transmission of Usenet articles is similar to that of Internet e-mail messages. The difference between the two is that Usenet articles can be read by any user whose news server carries the group to which the message was posted, as opposed to email messages, which have one or more specific recipients.

Today, Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to Internet forums, blogs and mailing lists. Usenet differs from such media in several ways: Usenet requires no personal registration with the group concerned; information need not be stored on a remote server; archives are always available; and reading the messages requires not a mail or web client, but a news client. The groups in alt.binaries are still widely used for data transfer.

Some Usenet BBS groups did transition to the WWW. Individuals (usually the moderators of a specific group) would transfer all the archives of a specific BBS into a Web based forum and some live on today. You might have visited such a group and not known of its historic origins or long life.

Very interesting ! Reminds me of the good old days when I used to go to different BBS with my 2400 bauds modem using xmodem, zmodem or kermit protocols! That was in late 80s/early 90s, before Internet was actually established and "www" meant absolutely nothing ! Boy, I am getting old...

Do you remember the Matchbox Community Hall Marc Bousquet used to have ? He quit collecting if I remember right and then MCCH came along. Can't remember the exact date but in my memory that's around 2000/2001. Is that how it all began ?

You explanations of the history on the MCCH should go directly in the knowledge base !

Pat

Looks to me as if there is enough information there from Joe, that we could re-boot the MCCH back into a living being...

Ghosty.

There is another thing about the Usenet and those BBS that might be of interest to some. The Usenet was created about 1980 and was the first way people began to communicate using the computer. Navigating around in those days was via a series of typed commands (mostly memorized). For nearly a decade, this was the domain of nerds, techies, university students, intelectuals and the US Government.

As Pat mentions, there was no GUI (graphic user interface), no point & click, no search engines of today. When ISPs like YaHoo, America Online (and others who have been absorbed or are now defunct) came into being, there was a huge resentment (most notable towards AOL) by people who had been using the Usenet for nearly a decade prior. Anyone using one of these GUI based ISPs was the second class citizen of the Internet. In many cases, they were treated like untouchables or sub-human races by the older users.

The Johnny Come Lately point and click users were blamed for the end of the Internet, for the birth of spam and an increase in trolls. The prejudice was often harsh and unjustified (as any prejudice often is). It took many years for those early GUI ISP members to overcome that prejudice. By the mid 1990's, it was clear that the landscape of Internet providers was rapidly changing along with the mass growth in users.

Back in the day, my Internet access and email was via NASA. I was never victim of the afore mentioned user prejudice but I often witnessed how harsh it could be. I was lucky to have access and an address that ended the same as that of rocket scientists and astronauts. That prejudice was an unfortunate attitude that was pervasive in those days.

Today, no one gives any thought as to how we access online global communications or to which device we use. For guys like me, I find myself living in a future we once only imagined. I can pull a device out of my pocket that is about the size of a very expensive late 1970's Texas Instruments pocket calculator and phone someone from where I might be standing, search the WWW or send/receive emails. I can use the same device to pay my bills, pay for my purchase in a store or send money to one of my children. I can get a boarding pass for an airline flight, see if the flight is on time and even pick out my seat.

The uses seem virtually endless and the technology is still advancing every day. So, we now come full circle back to the mcch. A Web site killed off my many things, not the least of which was a stubborn failure to advance along with current technology. There was simply no reason for that as the funds were plentiful enough for that to happen. It's all very sad that one man's greed, sloth and closed mindedness killed off a once fun and highly informative place.

I guess one day, in the not too distant future, some other format will replace this one and old dinosaurs like me will finally be overcome by technology that advances beyond my desire to keep up with it. Hopefully, by then I will be enjoying a simpler way of life outside the traffic flow of the rat race. Perhaps, exploring a distant lake, fishing or simply telling stories of the good ole days to the Grand Kids.

The more I think about it, the better it sounds. No more worries about fakers and fraudsters, no need to get the latest smart phone and all around fewer worries in general. I can finally move onto that sailboat and be another one of those old characters around the marina. Best of all, when the time comes, I'll just head out to open sea and aim towards the Southern Cross ... never to be seen or heard from again. If I'm really, really lucky, there will be rumors about me living in Brazil with a saucy bikini model.

Tinman wrote: If I'm really, really lucky, there will be rumors about me living in Brazil with a saucy bikini model.

Are you not already married to one Joe?

motorman wrote:

Tinman wrote: If I'm really, really lucky, there will be rumors about me living in Brazil with a saucy bikini model.

Are you not already married to one Joe?

I've been married to a few of them. The current wife, and love of my life, would certainly qualify (when we were younger). Mostly, I had a hard time keeping the top of her bikini on (or any of it on) as she preferred to swim au natural, mattered not where we were. These days, I'm just lucky to have a wife LOL (or anyone who puts up with me).