UrbanToronto is celebrating 20 YEARS throughout October with stories and images looking back over the last two decades. Today we let UrbanToronto members — or contributors as we like to credit them in the front page stories — to reminisce about their early days memories of the UrbanToronto Forum.

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When it was decided that it was time to look back on 20 years worth of UrbanToronto, our first move was to set up a thread in the Forum that started it all, and ask our contributors how they found the site and what it has meant to them over the years since. The thread is now many posts long, and worth a read, but we've pulled out a few of the posts specially for this look back, to give you a short highlights reel overview of where we come from. We'll mostly just let the members speak for themselves!

Early posts in the thread cover the founding of UrbanToronto itself (it's actually a bit more than 20 years old, but the first Forum pages are lost in the mists of time, regrettably defragged when we moved from our earliest Forum software to our second), what was happening at the time, and who some of the first members were...

From a screenshot of the oldest remaining post above…

…to what brought several members to our site, and what it's meant for each one:

UrbanToronto Forum contributor egotrippin below, has so far been the only member to resurrect some of his earliest photos posted to UrbanToronto in their post to this memories thread. Way back when, UrbanToronto was not hosting photos on its own, but relied on sites like Photobucket to host the image, and then our posts would link to their service. Photobucket and those other iamge hosting sites, however, were not reliable, and part-way through every month we'd see messages stating that the bandwidth limit had been reached until next month… …and then those images eventually disappeared entirely. UrbanToronto inaugurated our own hosting server, and since then, we've been able to keep a comprehensive photographic history of development in Toronto and the wider area we cover. More of egotrippin's old photos are now reposted in his post to our memories thread.

As was the story for many of our members, what they learned on UrbanToronto often influenced their career choice. UrbanToronto Forum contributor ericmacm provides his experience that regard below:

Participating on UrbanToronto affected my career even more directly: I went from using information found on UrbanToronto to help properly update maps of Toronto for MapArt, at the time Canada's largest consumer-oriented mapmaker, to working for UrbanToronto itself as its Managing Editor, trying to keep the Buildings Forum on track when there are hiccups, keeping up on crane-raisings and lowerings, tracking condo and rental building marketing for our Database files, and occasionally putting together my own front page stories. The plate has grown larger and larger over the years, and there's a more than ever to digest on it, but someone's got to burp their way through it all.

I'm letting A Torontonian Now have the last word in this story, below, as his post is very kind, and a nice ego boost for everyone participating on UrbanToronto. In any solid online community, like in any family, there are always the occasional squabbles, but overall I believe that A Torontonian Now speaks for most contributors and staff when they express their gratitude for the experience here. There are thousands of us, participating to greater or lesser degrees, most simply reading, and coming back again and again, often 200,000 different people popping in every month. That's quite the community, so yes, thank you to everyone who is helping to keep UrbanToronto informative, fun, and vital!

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UrbanToronto will return tomorrow with another story celebrating 20 YEARS. A second look back at transit over the period, this time on regional plans, will appear next week. In the meantime, check back often to our front page and Forum to keep an eye on all the current and emerging trends, and you can always leave your comments in the space below.

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Thank you to the companies joining UrbanToronto to celebrate our 20 years in business.