This is a reasonably amusing picture of me at a go tournament in the UK promoting the server with my fab merch - I would guess this is Feb/March 2007 
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Nice to see you again, @topazg, I had feared that you got lost 
And thanks a lot for telling us the story of the old OGS … would it be asking too much if I’d ask you to add a few dates (approximate year) to your history of OGS? I think that would be really helpful for understanding the Western Go scene back then.
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Sorry, I seem to keep failing to notice new posts here!
So the site became “public” in November 2005. The first mini-tournaments existed in December 2005, with 13x13 boards being implemented and a sort of beta 19x19 board at the same time.
A lot of the early players were family and friends: fingolfin was Andrew’s brother, Ariadne was my sister etc etc. The goal was to get enough people in that actual go players would at least have more opposition than just myself, and it made things like mini-tournaments feasible. They supported fantastically really until we had enough players that they could go off and do things they’d rather do with their time instead
Full site wide major tournaments started mid 2006 before becoming the different titles that are still maintained now. The handover to dmg happened around 2008 I believe, as I was getting divorced from my first wife and just didn’t have any time for it any more. dmg converted the site to PHP and then maintained it up until the merge with Nova. Although I still had access to stuff and helped out quite a bit, dmg definitely did the majority of everything from his takeover up to the merge.
Much of the big changes occurred post Nova, so the current administration would be far better equipped to answer
I also found my first ever 19x19 game lol: https://online-go.com/game/13141
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I joined OGS shortly before this Discourse-based forum was launched, replacing the custom forum integrated into the main site.
I barely remember what those older forums were like, and I was not nearly as active in them as I am now here. Does anyone remember those forums and could discuss a bit about them?
Were the archives of those old discussions saved anywhere?
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https://online-go.com/player/519197/
(A screenshot of the page to have better chances of survival if something bad happens to OGS :P)
Edit: chat icon
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According to timestamp 2017 January 27. We were young and hopeful back then.
4k overall, 6k live and 5k correspondence. I played as 5-6k EGF at the time, if ratings weren’t retroactively changed or something. This corresponds to:
- 3k (2.4k) first Glicko rating (rating-history);
- 4k (3.2k) changed Glicko rating (glicko2-history);
- 1k (0.2k) current Glicko rating (v5-rating-history).
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