If our memories and calculations are correct, ATRL began exactly 10 years ago: February 26, 1999. That's just ridiculous! Today is February 26, 2009, so we've reached a full decade. How did we ever get this far?
Back then, of course, it was
Absolute TRL, a very simple fan page for Total Request Live in its early days. I wasn't around when the site began, but I think the forums didn't even launch until about a year later.
(EDIT, 10/7/2010: Joe has posted some
more information about the very early days of ATRL; check out that post.)
Joe is probably the only person still around from 1999. He started this site and kept it running all this time. Another guy, Wendell, was also responsible for updating the main site for some time until 2002.
So how did I get here? I joined the Absolute TRL forums as a member in 2000. Back at the time, I was a contributor and moderator at the popular site,
TRL by Sarah. I became an administrator at Absolute TRL in 2001, after TRL by Sarah merged its message board with Absolute TRL. Now, in case you didn't know, TRL by Sarah was so popular because Sarah appeared on TRL for a week in April 2001. Thanks to the merger, Absolute TRL gained tons of members.
TRL by Sarah closed down in 2002, but Absolute TRL lived on and continued to gain new members, even as TRL slowly faded away in popularity. Some time around 2004, the Absolute TRL forums took over the entire site.
In 2006, we thought TRL was old and busted, so we changed our name to
Popfusion for a while. In 2007, we all realized that name didn't really work, because no matter what, everyone always called us "ATRL," so we changed our name again to just simply
ATRL. Not "Absolute TRL," mind you, because we were no longer a TRL fan site. We're just ATRL.
Since then, TRL itself was cancelled in 2008, but ATRL survives as an independent community, despite the demise of the original TV show that brought us here in the first place. That brings us to today... 10 freakin' years.
How long will ATRL be around? Joe says he'll keep paying for the site as long as enough people still visit. He might have some more ideas to celebrate our 10-year anniversary over the next few weeks and months.