While waiting for my desktop to reboot today, I decided to mine some data about our ERwin User Discussion Group. This was our first mailing list / online community, which we volunteered to manage after Duncan Dwelle decided to get out of the mailing list "business" he started in 1995. The ERwin Mailing list is now 13 years old -- a bratty teenager if I ever saw one.
Prior to our current implementation under WebBoard, we ran the list on my 486 PC in my basement. Duncan passed along the list of users to us in 1997, which we ran on that slow, lonely PC. Deciding that I needed a more robust solution, I created the WebBoard version of the list on 23 July 1999. I most likely held off approving new messages until there were a significant number of users registered, as Robert Pangborn was the first to post a message (other than me). His message was an introduction. Rick Bosworth and Doug Stone made their introductions shortly afterwards. I invite Robert, Rick, and Doug to post updates to their introductions. Maybe we all should?
The Data Modeling List was created just a couple of days later.
To date there are just over 7,200 messages posted to the ERwin User Discussion Group. Doug Stone made the first non-introduction post on opening day in the ERwin 3x Conference:
NU has had much success with SP2 for ERwin. It appears to have eliminated
some column ordering problems. We have since moved from build 434 to 436+
and that solved some small glitches. For ModelMart it has helped as well.
The only thing we seem to have more of on SP2 for ModelMart is bad columns
(they are missing references in indexes) but that may have something to do
with our Mart.
Doug
P.S. Karen, the email version of the ERwin list sends an incredible number
of
characters. I don't know what they are. Perhaps my email system
is adding or translating them, but I did not get them before. Can they be
removed from your server? Or maybe I need a text only email version?
Ah, and he reference one of the most annoying bugs in the WebBoard product that lasted for years because the product manager for WebBoard thought that it wasn't that bad because no one expected e-mail to be clear. This bug caused a lot of HTML like < pr > to show up in the messages. So painful. But you have to remember this was 1999 and many people in the tech industry (including some people I worked for and some members of the DAMA International Board) predicted that this whole Internet and e-mail thing was a fad that would soon die off. So fixing what was then perceived as a technical glitch being complained about by a bunch of technical people was just not a priority. Finally, though, a new product manager got it fixed.
While we have no way of telling which message is the most read, since most of you read the messages via e-mail, a posting about CA ERwin v4.0 Beta is our most viewed message on the discussion group website - a whopping 20,295 times. Of course, now that I've posted a link to it, that number will increase. I highly recommend a trip down memory lane for all of you to read about the excitement surrounding the eminent release of ERwin 4.0. This post also holds the record for most number of posts for the thread, at 35 messages.
The second most viewed message is one on CA Direction for ERwin, posted by Tom Bilcze.
The message with the longest life span (from first post to last reply) is a message I posted to the Contribute Tips and Trick conference on the Mass import of Definitions. I first posted this in January 2000 and the last reply was May 2007, for a life span of 2660 days.
So while technically we should celebrate the anniversary of our community as having started sometime in 1995 when Duncan started his mailing list, I think we should celebrate the creation of community on the WebBoard. That means that 23 July is our date. Watch for future posts about our celebration.