#1: Valerie Mates (valerie) on Mar 24, 2022

Happy eighteenth birthday WebPBN!

Glad you're here!

Woot!

Glad you're here as well, Valerie...you're the heartbeat of this site. As for me, I'm delighted to be a part of it.

Hooray! This is probably my favorite online community.

And it seems like only yesterday it was just a little WebPBN!

"probably"?!?!?

Me personally, I don't think I could choose between my favorite online communities that I'm in. For example, back in 1998 I joined an e-mail list of people who were expecting babies in the same month that I was. Now it is 24 years later and, to the surprise of everybody in that group, the group is still going strong. Those babies are adults now -- one of them even had a baby of her own recently -- and the parents have known each other for 25 years now. It's a group with a different dynamic than here (it feels sort of like having forty sisters and a couple of brothers!), but both are great communities and I am glad not to have to choose a favorite.

Yeah I was just giving her a hard time :)
24 years is an impressive amount of time for an online group to stay together and active!

I don't know exactly when I joined the site but my first puzzle created was November of 2009. So...I suppose I'm a WebPBN teenager????

I play games and do puzzles at a few other sites but it seems to me that the persistence of comments on puzzles helps to make this a community. I see the same commenters' names go back years and it feels like old friends. I miss those no longer with us and delight when a new voice joins the conversation.

I've often wondered about the "hidden" solvers. Of the sometimes hundreds of solvers, fewer than a dozen may leave comments on any given puzzle. Do they read the comments but opt not to speak or are they just in it for the puzzle and ignore the conversation.

In any case, in three years when WebPBN turns 21, I'll buy it a beer.

I agree about the puzzle comments.

I think a lot of people never discover that there are conversations here. Someday I'll start a discussion to ask the community for ideas about how to make the discussions more visible, like for example having the puzzle's comments show up automatically without needing to click.

I wish the site kept track of when people's accounts were created. There's no record of when people joined, so we can only make a guess based on their oldest comment or the date of the first puzzle that they created.

I know I solved for months before I discovered the forums.

I was timid. I solved and read the comments, but did not make puzzles or comments for quite a while.

I solved for a while before I created an account.

Happy 19th Birthday WebPBN!

And many more!

Late to the party but here!

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