PFF was born on January 13, 1999. I was a member of most Fiero email lists
out there, but wasn't all too happy with receiving tons of emails in my
mailbox every day. I searched high and low for a Fiero related messageboard,
but couldn't find one. I had the resources myself to create one, so I
downloaded the freeware version of Ultimate Bulletin Board and installed
that on one of my servers. I posted a few messages on newsgroups about its
existence and never really expected it to take off. As it turned out, there
was a high demand for a forum like this, and in just over 3 months the forum
welcomed its 100th member.
One of the reasons the forum was so succesful immediately was because
from the start a few very knowledgeable people embraced the forum. One
of these persons is theogre, a member who is still around and who
is a technical marvel. His technical papers can be found by clicking on
the "Ogre's Cave" link on the left.
I always made it a point that I wanted the forum to be self-moderating.
I don't believe in one person telling all the others what they are and
aren't allowed to post. This has been largely successful. Although
flamewares do exist on PFF, in comparison to other forums it's
all quite peaceful.
By now PFF has had over 9.5 million hits,
more than 13,000 people have registered,
and over 2 million messages have been posted,
all which can still be found in the archives. Since I started allowing
images to be posted together with the messages, more than
100,000 images have been uploaded to the
PFF server. This makes it the largest Fiero related photo database
in the world - by far. All in all, PFF is
17.2 Gb of Fiero related data.