Gee, you'd be interested in this? Well, it does seem so long ago but let me see what I recall.

Q. When did you first think of creating a forum for frequent flyers ?
A. Actually it was probably in the late 80s. With Inside Flyer, we went online with CompuServe and NewsNet back in 1987 (then known as 'FREQUENT') and did fairly well with earning royalties from those early online services. Probably in 1988/9 I started thinking about it since i was appearing as a guest on various travel chats with CompuServe and Prodigy. But at that time we were merely 'content providers' for these types of services and there was not much hope or opportunity for starting our own 'portal.'

Q. Was FT solely your idea ? Or did someone else give you the notion that the world (travellers) need such a website/message board ?
A. This was pretty much my idea. I really don't recall anyone else in the picture at that time and I didn't get much support from inside my company because the idea of all this was very foreign at the time. In fact, if I didn't own the company and made it a mandate, FlyerTalk likely would never have launched, but these were the early days of the commercial Internet and in my "space" there were no leaders or trail blazers. I recall that my motives were similar to that of the Freddies–that being to let the voice of the members of these programs be heard. With the idea of FT, I was starting to realize that I simply could not answer all the questions for advice I got daily from members (this was already a problem for me back at this time) and thought perhaps there might be a way to enlist my growing army of 'frequent flyer junkies' to help with others. That and the idea it was still a very small community at the time of real mileage junkies.

Q. When was the FT.com project launched ?
A. (see below for earlier information) The actual flyertalk.com was formally launched in May of 1998 (inhouse we refer to this period as 'Cinco de Miles.' If my memory serves me correct, we had worked for a few weeks non-stop to work out some bugs, rethink our strategy and populate the skeleton of the orginal forums. My name to seed these forums was 'MileMonitor.'

Q. When was it uploaded onto the internet ?
A. It was in the Fall of 1995. We launched a portal on AOL on Sept. 7, 1995 and on Set. 15 launched webflyer.com (we already had existing content up on CompuServe and Prodigy, though had dropped off NewsNet at this same time). Within a month or so of launching webflyer.com, I remembered my idea of a bulletin board from 1989 and commissioned an outside tech team to build the first FlyerTalk. I did not have the internal talent I have today and remembered it cost $12,000 to deliver a somewhat custom bulletin board - nothing like what you see today. At this time, the address was webflyer.com/flyertalk. It lived within WebFlyer and was not a destination site of itself. This first FlyerTalk bulletin board lasted only about three months before we took it down either in late December 1995 or early in 1996. Our meta tags said 'chat' and we were inundated with people from the Scandinavian countries and Germany who were looking to pick up chicks on the "Internet." I think our noise to signal ratio was nearly 95% and I did not have the in-house resources to constantly - and I do mean daily, if not hourly - to clean up the type of language and hustling we had during this infant period of the Internet. For historical purposes - during these three months is when the first official 'time out' was awarded (contrary to belief, it wasn't oz).

Q. When was the first topic posted ?
A. From the above seeding of topics, I think the first reply was on May 10, 1998 at 11:55 pm by member 'acvitale' in the TWA forum. American's forum was replied to on May 13 and Marriott on May 14 among others. A slow start because we did not have a marketing campaign - it rather home grown.

Q. By whom was it posted, who was the first FTer to reply ? Do you still have a link to this thread ?
A. http://www.flyertalk.com/pasttalk/ft...ML/000001.html

Q. Who are the founding members?
A. Good question and as you might guess, I'm sure to leave many out - it was a long time ago to me. I remember these names from the very early days: chris_elam, Flying Dutchman, Catman, Dealer, AusTXHiker, megamiles, birdyy, MileKing, MardiPardi, Blondie, jaws43, emmett_s, Lewisdeb, MattWald. I also remember the PremEx, Rudi and NJDavid days. As noted, surely many i haven't named but every member, past, present and future is valuable to FlyerTalk, valuable to me and valuable to themselves.

Q. How many members (registered) did FT have after one, two, three, etc. years, how many does it have now ?
A. A tough question to answer because we do something I don't believe many other Web sites do. We actually clean and squeeze the membership numbers to try and get better performance out of database activity. Every six months, we go back two years and delete those registered members without any posts. The idea being that if you have not posted in two years time, you are enjoying lurking and that's fine with us. I do know that to date we have squeezed over 25,000 registrations off our our membership list this way–again, just trying to keep things clean and provide the best possible board performance for our members.

As for total members–growing too fast to count. And other than counting posts to create a celebration of giveaways, it's quality of our members, not quantity. I think we have more total posts than most any other travel Web site. I recently visited one that mentioned they had over 300,000 members, but we had more posts. I like active members, not quantity of members. What is unique about FlyerTalk is the number of page views per user. For instance, fodors.com is listed on Alexa as having a 3-month page view per user average of 5.7; lonelyplanet.com a 3-month page view per user average of 6.0 and virtualtourist.com of having a 3-month page view per user average of 6.4. The 3-month page view per user average of flyertalk.com is 19.5

Here's my own question and answer:
Q. What was the most magical moment for you with FlyerTalk?
A. It had to be the first PiP in Hawaii. The wonderful antics of members such as kokonutz playing tennis, the canned string attack at the chocolate tasting (you really had to be there for that), the wonderful dinner and gift exchanges and just total friendship among members and to be topped off with a presentation from Catman, NJDavid and Rudi of the URL of flyertalk.com (I actually did not own it then) in a plaque that hangs proudly in my office today (hardwood with brass plate and a computer keyboard with a Continental jet glued on). That was a very magical time for me. To this day and many more forward, I'll always feel indebted to those that attended that event (Nov. 4, 1999) and to the pure gentleman that Catman, NJDavid and Rudi were and are.

Hope this helps you all understand your roots.

[This message has been edited by Randy Petersen (edited 10-15-2003).]

[This message has been edited by Randy Petersen (edited 10-15-2003).]