I remember it when it was weirdly yellow coloured
Or at least I hope I do, or I would be imagining that and that'd be distressing. Pretty sure it wasn't much more than a link to a yahoo group.

I remember the furtive bear stealing a fluffy penguin for the first time. I remember dogs in snoods. I remember a picture of a tennis player kissing a trophy which appeared to be a glass cock. I remember a zillion people all posting the same image. I remember the flood of traffic when the newsletter pointed its gaze at tinywindowsgames.com (Now defunct) which led to a hong kong museum paying me $50 to put tiny space invaders in some sort of gallery. That was cool. B3ta was the direct cause of me dicking around with a wide array of web technologies. Without b3ta, I would not know perl, PHP, flash or MySQL. I'd certainly be a lot shittier at photoshop than I am now.

I remember the spiderman who would make you gay, and 'introducing monday' ("Ha ha ha, we've got your name..."). And the dark day when the board ruined the life (Or at least the website) of some guy called Andrew somethingorother.

Because of b3ta, I was once interviewed by a broadsheet newspaper (Scotland on Sunday, I think) on the subject of websites that allow people to shirk of work in the office. I was one of three interviewed and used an alias. For some reason, I pretended to be 2 of those people, which seemed weirdly to be a b3ta thing to do.

I remember when the image challenge only had one winner, and each week had its own judge picked from the board. Back then you had a chance of winning or being FP'd just by virtue of producing lots of images. I managed both and all mine were shit.

I remember making a clone messageboard on dynofoo.com which became a sort of unofficial backup board when b3ta went down. It had coloured edges on the left of posts to show you what was new. I like to fantasise that b3ta copied that from me.

Can't actually remember how I found the site actually. It was almost certainly from some sort of flash thing. Or perhaps some sort of quiz based on transgender ladymen.

Being miles from London, I never met any of the people behind the curious little aliases. I do, however, still have a b3ta tee shirt. I wore it to work recently and it spawned a conversation about animated gifs.

Sorry about the line breaks.

Potatoswap. Ovenready. Happy birthday, b3ta.. Woo! Yay!
( izb posting occasional messages since 2001, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 14:51, 5 replies)

hells teeth!
Hello sah! Have a kitten.
( witchy is covered in BEES, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 15:40, closed)

Thank you!
Very kind!
( izb posting occasional messages since 2001, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 16:33, closed)

come join us
all on c4mbodia.com, some of us are there, rest of us are on bacefook and tw*tter!
( witchy is covered in BEES, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 0:08, closed)

Good times!
Dynofoo was ace. I had a look a year of two back to see if it was still there. Thanks for setting it up all those years ago anyway.
( rogan, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 19:12, closed)

Helleau!
Lovely to see the old beans all de-lurking :)
( jiva nearly always up for a game of scrabble, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 20:32, closed)