I joined pretty early, 28th of June 2004. It wasn't the first online reptile group I'd found or even the first Australian one, but it had a nice community at the time. Wow, the best part of 20 years now... it has gone through a few iterations, some better than others. For a while it almost held a monopoly on the Australian online reptile discussion scene. It has changed hands and management styles... quite an adventure really. Funny that it when it was at its peak we all thought it was terrible, and it ended up being replaced by far far worse Facebook groups.
One mistake most of the forums have been making over the last 5-10 years is seeing that Facebook is more popular, so trying to copy Facebook and be more like it. You'll never beat Facebook at being like Facebook, and Facebook is garbage so you don't want to be like it anyway. Forums should try to be like brilliant forums so that people have a reason to come to them, rather than making them think 'this is like Facebook so I might as well just go to Facebook'.