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Thank You for 10 years of Speedsolving

pjk

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Mar 13, 2006
Messages
6,686
WCA
2007KELL02
SS Competition Results
As of the last month, Speedsolving.com is 10 years old.

I joined the speedcubing community in 2005, and at that time most people were using a Yahoo group and mailing list to communicate and discuss speedcubing. I had previously used forums extensively and really disliked using email to have lengthy discussions with many people. The forum was setup originally using the domain rubiks.has.it on a phpBB forum. It relatively quickly was used and within a year a few hundred of us were using it. Fast forward a couple years and speedcubing as a sport took off, and the community grew. Fast forward to today and several thousand people use speedsolving.com everyday. It's been fascinating to see how the sport changed, and how the community has changed with it.

Since the beginning, I've seen speedsolving.com as a community project - for the community, by the community. While I've managed to setup and maintain a platform and run the technical backend, the real value in the community is from all the people who have been or are a part of it over the years. The wiki is a perfect demonstration showing how the collective time and effort of the community results in a huge resource for everyone to use and benefit from. All I've done is setup the platform with the help of many many people from the community. Things like the AlgDB are products of the community, which have been incredibly useful for everyone, and will continue to be.

This site has only been possible by volunteers who've help moderate and build the community, others who've contributed to discussions to help others, and by you, the members, who setup and organize all the facets of speedcubing as we know it, including hundreds of competitions organized over the years.

A lot has changed in 10 years both in the community and with technology and how we use the internet to communicate. The growth of the community and speedcubing has changed a lot, the improvements on records has been incredible, the array of puzzles available is now abundant. There is a lot more of everything really, and the dynamic of seeing it all blend as it is today is exciting. Many older members have left, many are still around, and new people continue to join everyday (around 40 people register each day now). With change comes a lot of things.

Speedcubing is unique in many ways, and the way it has brought all of us together is special. I've met many great friends and traveled to many far away places to see them and compete with them, and explore with them. And I share this story with thousands of others in our community. We all share a common hobby, and it is a hobby that most outsiders find amazing. Anywhere you go in the world people know of a Rubik's Cube, it's something special. Solving it fast is exciting to even people who've never seen one.

I wanted to make this post to say thank you for making speedsolving.com and the speedcubing community what it is today. I'm privileged to be a part of it and look forward to seeing what happens in the future.

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Some random stats about speedsolving.com:
  • The US makes up about 38% of all users, the rest are outside the US.
  • The top 5 countries by usage are USA, UK, Canada, India, and Australia, in that order.
  • About 58% of users use Chrome as their browser, Safari 22%, and Firefox at 10%.
  • There are 1,084,000 posts over 44,500 threads (I remember getting to 20,000 posts and thinking that everything there was to say about speedcubing has been said, haha)
  • There are 31,200 registered members.

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Updates:
There is a big upgrade coming soon and is currently in the works. It will basically be a shift in the forum software that the forum is using, and it will be a lot better in many ways. I look forward to launching in the coming weeks and will let you know more details soon.

Also, we need more people interested in working on the backend community stuff. If you're interested in joining the moderating team and contributing ideas, helping manage the community, helping get feedback and implement it, etc. please let me know.

If you're interested in working on backend technical stuff like upgrades, server/database stuff, modifications, web design, please let me know. We could use more help.
 
I

IAmEpic2004

Guest
Wow, amazing! I thought it was 2008 or something...
anyway, happy b-day speedsolving!
Thank you for everything.
 
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