What up, PALS!
It was exactly
20 year ago that skateboarding changed forever when the website for SLAP Magazine opened a public message board forum.
Happy birthday SLAP Forum!
I spent a lot more time than I should have digging around the Internet Archive to gather a little history for y'all and see how things looked back in the day. This might be a long post, so get comfy...
While the exact date the SLAP Forum launched could not be determined, the oldest record that could be recovered was from July 11th, 2001. The Forum was already up and running at that time with a whopping 87 members and 42 topics in Categories like "Skate Talk" and "Brandy's Corner".
Things seemed to grow quickly. Here is one of the earliest sampling of threads I could find, from the "Website Suggestions" board:
Here is a bit of what the front page of the slapmagazine.com looked like at this time (Oct 2001):
By December of 2001, things we're rolling. The "Skate Talk" board, with multiple mods, had threads hitting plural page counts.
It is cool to see topics with themes like "Who is this kid?", "Tricks you learned today", and "Old Spitfire vids". The more things change, the more they stay the same.
By June of 2002, the Forum was up to 614 members and over 1300 topics. The color scheme had gone grey at this time, apparently.
Just for comparison (and if you haven't checked the Statistics Center on SLAP, it is fascinating (
https://www.slapmagazine.com/index.php?action=stats)) at the time of this post I'm writing right now (and the current stats go back to 2005) there are 37640 members and 99502 topics.
And now here is how things looked in 2004:
Things start to look familiar in this 2007 screen shot (some images aren't archived, though). "Skate Talk" has turned into the "Useless Wooden Toy Banter" we know and love. "Photo/Video", "Whatever: whatevs", "Events/Classifieds", "Music" (although "from 8-Track to Ipod" is pretty dated), and "Classic SLAP" is all there.
For the next 7 or so years, the Forum is part of a well balanced SLAP website, even though the printed SLAP magazine stopped in 2008. Here are screen-shots of the website sidebar "Hot Topics from the Forum" from 2011:
At some point this may have evolved into "Forum Feeder" updates on a sidebar of other articles:
A sample of "Article Roulette" from 2013
While it feels like the real decline of original SLAP content began with the collapse of the 2012 One In A Million season, the marked slowdown of non-forum SLAP website posts began in July of 2014. Over the next few years, there were only a handful of posts, with about a third of them related to the death of a skateboarder (Matt Reason, Jay Adams). The final SLAP front page post was on October 13, 2016, about Dylan Rieder's passing.
Sometime between September 28 - 30th, 2017, the index page of slapmagazine.com redirected straight to the Forum, thus ushering in the contemporary era.
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This is all just what I found digging around, but I wasn't here for most of it. Please, join in on the 20-Years-of-SLAP-Forum conversation with your fond (or loathsome) recollections of the SLAP Forum. If anybody can fill in the gaps, or correct some of my assumptions here, please do so. If anybody can convince Trippe to log back in and kick some knowledge, that would rule.
Big
THANK YOU to all the Mods past present and future for volunteering their time, High Speed for keeping the Forum up and running, and everyone for contributing in one way or another.
Pour some out for the homies who focused their accounts or are no longer with us for other reasons.
Topic: Happy 20th Birthday SLAP FORUM (Read 5539 times)