The most recent prior incarnation started in Sept of 2001. 9/11 happened shortly thereafter. I don’t remember prior stuff, pretty sure I wasn’t involved in any prior versions.
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i was on the cas water cooler until the shut down. had lurked on the AO before that but after the spew, i needed a place to bring my time wasting.
First ao was just Serena on that free forum that only handled 100 threads. It kept getting hacked by space lobster. I was an actuarial student at the time and running an actuarial bookstore so I contacted Serena and said hey, I have servers with backups, why dont I host it and then we have backups.
We ran on bbforums or something for a bit likely around 2000, then killed that and went with whatever software the AO ended up on, just before 9-11.
We looked at doing another one in 2014 but I was too busy with other stuff. Set up this site around 2019, had a false start and I shut it down for a bit. Then when the AO died, I turned this back on.
That’s the incomplete history of the AO.
Reminds me of some of my favourite posters from years ago that have now passed.
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Asking the real question there.
When I was a kid, we lived in England for a year and watched the final season of Blake’s 7. There weren’t 7 of them, and no one was called Blake, so it was a bit of a weird title for a show. I feel a bit like that when people talk about former members.
Note: Blake does show up for the final episode of the final season, which is all the more random if you don’t know who TF Blake is.
The AO arose as the SoA “official” forum dwindled. The SoA discontinued theirs when one of the posters mounted a personal attack on another poster. It was too much for a forum in which we used our actual names for posting. 
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That was part of it. But another part of the success of the AO was that we kept the servers online when marks were released, and the SOA website always went offline about 30 seconds after marks were released. I remember doing quite a few things to make sure we didn’t go offline; I had paid $30k to install a fibre line at a time when everyone else was one copper. We’d turn the forum to minimal mode, and I would swap cpu’s and ram from my other servers to up the horsepower so we could handle the load.
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Forum admin people are the same as they always were. We just don’t use IRL names here. Credible threats have been made towards admins, so we’d like to keep things at least a bit anonymous, even if most folks here know who Serena and I am.
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i remember a SD in SF, who had to remove himself from the SOA directory due to people figuring out who he was. I believe they called his work.
I was easy to figure out in those days
SD?
Yeah, I wanna say September 8, 2001 was the start date for what was then called the Rebel Forum … website was www . actuary . ca (minus the spaces, of course)
those were his initials, so pretty easy to figure out
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Oh, like SD was his RF/AO handle and also his IRL initials? Yeah, that would narrow it down!
Anyone who’s a regular on here or AO and also knows me IRL can probably connect the dots, but I certainly don’t advertise it.
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I think i came across the old forum because of 9/11 in the days after (likely 9/14 or 9/17). I was looking to see if there were actuarial firms in the WTC. Joined sometime in the next month.
started a new job 12/99. And a new line of business for me, i think i found it doing a google search on a product feature
I posted way too much back then. Or maybe I’m just less aware here now that i don’t see post counts everywhere.
I started working on 9/10/2001 and I was on the rebel forum back then. Mostly just lurking tho and checking out the exam forums
Dw let actuary.ca drop. I tried to pick it up at auction but lost to a domain hoarder unfortunately.
I could’ve increased my chances by taking some additional steps but figured I didn’t need to, nobody else interested. Well, there was one person interested.
Mini T-2 is the 12th fastest female DIII outdoor 100M Hurdler in the country. 11th fastest in the DIII Indoor 60M Hurdles
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22 yo just performed “Ah! Je veux vice” from Roméo et Juliette (Charles Gounod) and nailed it.
She was the second of three award winners who performed in this concert. Immediately after those three pieces was intermission. The guy in the row directly behind us said to his companion something along the lines of “That second soloist was phenomenal.”
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