This will be of interest maybe to "Hillary's Colon", ndo and JoFrance who are listed as members of that old board.

I have a hidden backup copy of the forum I ran that preceded this one.

ComputerConsultantsForum.com (call it 'CCF') was a rebranding of an older forum called "OpenIT" that was formed in 2002 when disgruntled forumers from a BBS run by a popular computer consulting author left her BBS and started a less censored forum. I wasn't the owner then but I requested and was handed the forum by the owner who considered it a growing nuisance, and I branded it "CCF" and and made it "my own web app" in 2010.

The board was a robust discussion community but declined over time from 2010 on.

I shut down CCF in 2019 - the date appears to be sometime in the spring of 2019 - and devoted my part time energy to this place. I shut down CCF because posting had gotten to maybe 2-3 messages a week and it was painful to watch. I hate running into dead forums so I killed it off. But made my own backup.

I did block known web spiders with robots.txt and I sent a request (which was honored) to the Internet Archive to block their store of CCF's pages. Therefore except for my personal copy, CCF is completely erased from web history.

Some general thoughts:

- CCF showed robust interest in a wide range of topics, and a lot of "drill downs" of topics such as politics, economics, freelancer "arbitrage" and negotiation, H1B, etc.

- I was a pissy person back in the 2010s with very half baked, incoherent ideas about how the world and especially how politics operated. I took way too many discussions personally. I argued semi convincingly but there were a lot of holes in my logic and my grokking of the world.

- I knew a fuckton of a lot about how to fail as a freelance IT person. Not much about how to succeed.

- Almost all of my personal business posts from 2010 onward were about pain, insult, being demeaned and insulted, being screwed, being threatened. Not one thing seemed to ever even vaguely go my way. If I wrote some nice marketing copy for a business they would not pay me or would insult it childishly. If I built a web site to specs I would be threatened with legal process.

I honestly believe I was cursed to stay in IT and maybe cursed in life in general. I mean cursed as in actual demons haunted my every move. Not kidding.

(Personal insight: this probably says that I really never learned how to decisively leave really bad situations, and instead dug into bad scenes as a sort of personal honor code thing that eventually metastasized into a degree of self hatred.)

- I did have a whale of a lot of practical business knowledge that seems to still be valid. Negotiation, how clients and consultants reason, the weak spots of each, etc.

- The actual discussions on CCF in its best years (say 2006-2015) read to me like the dialog of philosopher-kings. Amazingly great clarity of arguments in general, great debates, problems not solved but characterized with a verbal scalpel.

I sit on the fence and say to myself at times "I f*cking wasted decades on these forums" but CCF was a legitimate, valid community of highly intelligent raconteurs that overall behaved pretty decently.

I honed some fairly good writing and written argumentation skills.

I'm kind of in awe of what used to be, and is no longer possible. Social media killed off that clubbiness, and people today are impatient about anything that isn't directly functional to themselves.