Happy Starday, Gang of Five!
It is very cool indeed that our little community has made it to 17 years. Also a bit surreal to think that the forum is now older than some of its members.
I officially joined on March 29th, 2019. Come 2020, and I had been planning to do a special post on March 29th to talk about my own one-year anniversary with this community. I ended up not getting around to it, but it kept lingering on my mind, and I kept thinking about simply doing it belated. Then, several days ago when I saw Rhombus post in here, that gave me the motivation to write up my anniversary post at last. It's several months late now, but oh well.
This is more or less what I had originally wanted to talk about. Some of this I've mentioned before in other places, but I wanted to consolidate it all into one post here.
Some of our members have been familiar with
The Land Before Time for a long time, whereas others have discovered it much more recently. For myself, it is a bit of both. I watched several of the films back in my elementary school days in the 90s, but that was it for a very long time. I remembered the original film most of all, and I kept occasionally wanting to revisit it over the years, even as I entered adulthood, but it took me a very long time to get around to it.
Things finally changed when the original film hit its 30th anniversary in November of 2018, which I was initially unaware of, but soon after is when I stumbled upon
this article on Fandom.com about the film. And this is what inspired me to rent the film from my local library, whereupon I watched it at home and fell in love with it.
As for the Gang of Five itself, I discovered it through TV Tropes... sort of. Their
Land Before Time page mentioned an active fanbase and a forum for the series. At this point, it was still only the first film I'd watched recently
(the sequels and TV series I didn't see until after I was already a member here), but that appealed to me all the same since I loved the film so much and wanted to find other people I could talk about it with. So I did a web search for "Land Before Time forum" and that's how I found this place.
I lurked sporadically for about a month before registering, but I've been an active member ever since.
For a community that ended up having such a large impact on my life, it sure is strange to think that, if it hadn't been for that Fandom.com article, it might never have led me here. Or at the very least, I might have ended up joining at a much later date.
It's also weird to think that things might've turned out very differently if I had tried to register sooner, as it was a couple or so months that passed after I rediscovered the film before I eventually came to the forum. And even once I did, the fact that I lurked around for a while first. I learned from Mumbling later on that the notification system wasn't working properly at the time, and that new members weren't getting their email notifications to tell them that they could now access the forum, which thus caused many of the potential new members to forget about it and move on. I got lucky because when I finally registered, it was only a few days after the problem stopped.
The Gang of Five was the first new forum that I had joined in a very long time. I used to participate in forums and such a lot more frequently in my late teens and very early adulthood. But I had a lot of bad experiences with it, which eventually drove me away from online communities entirely for the next several years. Some of my bad experiences were because of my own immaturity and behavioural issues, I'll admit, but there were also some genuinely toxic sinkholes I had the misfortune of stumbling upon.
Which made this lovely place stand out that much more. This is honestly the nicest internet community I have ever been to. I would never have expected I could make so many great friends here after all those horrible experiences I had in my distant past, but I have. As Anagnos mentioned, there have been some ups and downs. 2020 has been a crazy year, both for the community itself and the world at large. And I have had a lot of change and upheaval in my own personal life as well. But there have still been many good things amidst all the bad, and those are the things that I try to focus on. And I think it is truly commendable that we have pulled through and that we are still here to make this community the kind, energetic, and welcoming place that it is.
So thank you, Gang of Five and everyone in it. I too have absolute confidence that we will make it to twenty years and beyond.
Cheers,
- Ian
