Just checking the place out.....

[DontGiveACareBear]

Man, it has been a long time since I was on this site. I was a member of the original Bolt.com about when it started. Joined in 1997 and was on the site until they shut it down with little to no warning in 2007 I think.

Anyway, I doubt anyone here remembers those days! Just for kicks though, I know it's a shot in the dark, but if anyone else remembers those times and hung out on the Gossip Board, I was SatanClaws. Me and a guy named Virus2 started the squirrel army which was a bunch of people who opened new accounts with the name squirrel (I was SatanSquirrel) and together we'd flood the boards with posts just for kicks.

Sucks how it just shut down the way it did. I had lots of good friends I interacted with on here and then just poof! They were gone! I still wonder about a lot of them, never had a chance to share email addresses or anything so when they were gone they were gone.

That sounds a bit like a downer of a post, doesn't it? Well, is anyone else from the old school bolt? Before they made it into Bolt2, and then just dumping the site all together? I see that although they have the classic boards look..... kinda...... that some notable boards are missing. No Gossip board for one! And I didn't see a vampire or goth board either.

Anyway, I'm gonna have to check this out a little more when I have the time.

Rock on and peace out!

[Number 6]

Welcome home

[Number 6]

More of us than not remember the original Bolt. And that's why we're here.
The more dedicated amoung us are working hard to bring back the parts of Bolt that we loved. We believe in it.

So climb aboard the good ship Liberation, and sail into a new era of Social Media with us.
It takes Bolties to build a Bolt.

[Dahlia]

Seems you feel right about the matter that one day the site just shuts down & you lose contact with all your good buddies.So it's ok even if it sounds a bit like a downer of a post heh

[DontGiveACareBear]

So it sounds like some of you were members of the original bolt as well, is that right?

[Number 6]

I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone around here who wasn't around for the original.

The crazy thing is that you probably wont meet lot of the people you know again. Bolt was so bloomin' vast, bigger than any of us realised.

I'd like to see those days return. You may say I'm a dreamer... but I'm not the only one :D

[DontGiveACareBear]

Eh, when they restarted the page and tried to follow the Myspace formula years back I actually ran into a friend on there who recognized me, which was pretty cool. Of course, then the place shut down again but at least that time we had each other's contact info. No reason to lose hope that it might happen again.

[Number 6]

It'd be cool if, given a few factors working out, this site went viral. Y'know, folks scrolling through a website one day and see a link button of the Bolt icon, and the adventure of reuniting can continue indefinitely. It can be done. And it will go on forever and ever, it wasn't just the U.S. that had access to Bolt. I'm from Ireland and I met a few folks around the country there. So we're talking millions of people.

Maybe if I convince the guys running this place to ditch this shitty rent-a-software running here we can rig up a profile field for a searchable database of old usernames. It'd be like looking up your old classmates on Facebook after 20 years :D

[DontGiveACareBear]

Oh yeah, totally world-wide! One of my friends, Frannie (aka "Worthless") was from England. I don't know how likely it is that they could put together that database. The rights to site have been sold off like, three times I believe. I don't believe that the administrators who started it (e.g., Janey) are even involved with it anymore.

Love Ireland, Guiness and Smithwicks are two of my faves!

[Number 6]

Never drank a Smithwicks, nor has anyone I ever known. Guinness is good. People say it's an acquired taste, I think it can be acquired but a particular sort of person loves it from the start.

Now what's this about rights to the site? What rights? I don't see anyone's copyright here, and to be honest they can go fuck themselves. WE don't need them. And I can build that database.

Bolt lives here. Nowhere else. And it's ours.

[DontGiveACareBear]

Smithwick's is very good!

Yes, the site has changed hands like three times now. Crap always gets lost in the changeover, and poorly as the companies have handled the site since acquiring it, all three times, it wouldn't surprise me if the database of original bolt members was lost. I don't believe that any of the folks who purchased the rights, I don't even think the originators of the site were too concerned about saving that information. I mean, the people who started it all didn't listen to the cries of their members who despised the changes towards the new formats that they moved to. They showed no concern when they changed the url of original bolt to bolt2.com, which left many who weren't aware of the coming change unable to log on, and they showed no concern when they aborted the original bolt format all together. The result of course, being the fall and eventual closure of the site.

[Number 6]

Okay, see, there are no companies. Look to the bottom left "Created by Bolt Restarter". This is a dude who, like myself and yourself, remembered. And he acted on it. He wasn't the first to do so, and yes there were upsets in the data. But that's because it wasn't a company.

And when it comes to the database, it'll have to be manual insertion: you enter your old Bolt handle(s) and we can find each other in an electronic "yearbook".

This is what kinda upsets me. I love my fellow Boltians, but we're all as dim and ignorant as any handful of people. There is NO COMMERCIAL INTEREST IN BOLT. So you come here, you see things don't work, you see it's quiet, you see it's not what Bolt once was. Instead of staying here and offering their hands to fix it they feel this sense of entitlement and leave... mostly because we assume there's a commercial interest behind it that should be doing a better job. I loose sleep over this. It's tragic. Just another example of our entitlement culture, we're not banding together to do things together anymore.

This is a work in progress... you gonna stick around? :D

[DontGiveACareBear]

It's an interesting concept, the whole yearbook idea. I look forward to seeing how it works out.