Afterdawn was one of the first forums I ever joined, years ago. It started out with a desire to learn how to copy CD's and DVD's. I had the idea of making "bootleg" disks and then selling them, after watching some other guy actually doing this in real life. I learned the whole thing, and even made a bunch, but never actually pulled the trigger and sold them. But I learned a lot. One thing I learned was the value of online forums. From learning how to burn optical media to learning about the technical characteristics of the media, and the optical drives themselves, I branched out and learned other hardware, and software repair, how (then) WinXP and Vista was copyright protected, how to defeat pw protection using Ophcrack, etc... Eventually sold Computer Repair Services on Craigslist and made some money, and expanded my skills by hands-on experience. A few years ago I tried to come back here and the whole forum was completely covered in spam, like the owner abandoned it. But today I had a video editing question and as an experiment I did a Google search for "afterdawn", and found it. Took a guess at what email account I might have used and what password and hit jackpot. Can't really tell what year I joined on my profile, and I'm curious to know. TBH I don't like the new forum software. "Xeno" whatever. Another forum I like, "MyDigitalLife" also changed to it, and I don't like it there either. In case anyone wants to know. It seems kind of cramped and counter-intuitive, but maybe it's just a matter of getting used to it. I used to really like vBulletin and now I can't stand it. Anyways in case there's an owner or an admin reading this, I'd be interested in knowing when I first joined, and what the history of the forum has been since then. Did it change owners, etc...
