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Hi. Welcome to the CorrBoard.
The original CorrBoard was created in July 1997 by "Galley", another Corrs fan.
That board used the services of the InsideTheWeb (ITW) free message board system.
The address of that board was
http://www.insidetheweb.com/mbs.cgi/mb8245. Not the easiest address in the world
to remember, but since it was the only message board of its kind,
as the Corrs' popularity began to grow, so did the popularity of that message board.
Sadly, some people took advantage of the anonymous interface used by
the former message board, and soon it became inundated with various undesirable content.
Galley did his best to remove the messages, but he had never intended to devote a lot of
time to moderating the board, and the reputation of the board started to tarnish.
Ironically, it was right around that time that Jim Corr himself paid his first visit to the board,
answering several of the fans' questions posed there. Galley decided that the
board had become too much responsibility for him to man by himself,
so he started asking around to see who might be interested
in taking over moderator responsibilities. I was really the only one who expressed
any interest, and somewhere around the middle of 1998, he gave me the honor of
becoming the Corrs Message Board administrator. For the next couple of years we all used the ITW board. During that time, features that you see today, such as the Contributors Page, were gradually added. But soon we encountered a new problem: ITW itself. Aside from the ongoing problems with anonymous users, ITW added more and more automated system controls to their boards. The worst of these controls proved to be anti-spam software, which resulted in messages mysteriously disappearing from our message boards. Still, in the absence of a better alternative, our users didn't want to switch. They simply liked the format of the ITW boards. So we hung on. Somewhere around that time it occurred to me that the domain name "www.corrboard.com" was available for the taking. The ungainly ITW URL was simply too hard to remember without a bookmark, and since URLs are almost free ($35 per year), I could see no reason not to set up a simple URL redirection from www.corrboard.com to the ITW board. The number of users didn't really increase as a result, but it was my hope that it would make it a little easier for our current users to find. The CorrBoard was born. ITW's problems became too great to ignore when, as a result of adding additional new "features", our message board was unavailable for almost a week. As it turned out, however, technological advances had made server CGI very affordable over the recent years, to the point where one company, Hypermart, offered free CGI to its customers. Within a week, I had written my own message board software (using Perl and CGI) and opened the new board up for testing. After a week or so on the new board, it appeared stable enough to become a permanent replacement for our troubled ITW board, and that's where we are today. Since I wrote all the CGI code that runs that board, I've been able to add many long-awaited features to the board, such as a co-moderator, IP address blocking, and message counters. With the new board running smoothly, I took the next logical step in creating the ultimate forum for a Corrs fan: paying $10 per month for ad-free hosting. With no more ads to slow us down, and some nice little caching algorithms in place, the new board was not only better looking than the ITW board, but also much faster. With the new board successfully deployed, it was time to take the final step: I shut down the old board and relocated the www.corrboard.com domain name to Hypermart servers. The CorrBoard that you see today exists for the express purposes of helping to promote the Corrs and giving Corrs fans a place to get to know each other. I do this for one simple reason: I love the Corrs' music. Without getting too philosophical, it suffices to say that I'm not doing this for money. You will not see any advertisements on these pages, so if you're a potential advertiser and you're reading this, please don't bother. I do this for fun as a hobby, and anything else would not only impede the performance of this message board, but it would become a conflict of interest for me in my regular job as a software developer. If you'd like to read or write to the CorrBoard, please take a moment to look at our guidelines. And if you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to let me know. You can reach me (Mark) at: corrs4me@hotmail.com. Thanks, and enjoy!
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