chinaman bhai ... i see how it is. You didn't think my voice was impressive eh ? Maybe I needed to serenade you or something with my melodious voice. It worked on your bhabi (or maybe she just lies to me to keep me happy).
I would say that Fwullah was the first one to join the forum (at teststatus.com - I didn't like the name but rivals offered it free of charge) and i was kinda surprised to have a woman as our first member. More surprising was the fact that she was from Bangladesh. Pompous already mentioned some of the other earliar members.
I remember looking for other sites like mine but (this was around 1997/98 - I had service with iocc.com out of arkadelphia, AR) it was really frustrating at the time. Cricinfo was my main source and later I found the dailystar, ittefaq, the independent, and dhaka-bangladesh.com. I was so happy to see my site linked from Zunaid bhai's virtual bangladesh site. He had a section on sports and he had cricket and soccer (right?) listed there and he had a good bd website links page if I am not mistaken.
I was also a regular in irc (undernet - #bangladesh among others) and I used to mention the site every chance i got. People never really paid attention (unless we won).
Anyone here been to the old
www.iocc.com/~salient/cricket/ site ? That was the mother/father (whatever you want to call it) of banglacricket.com. It did not have a forum but it used to get daily updates by me (I wish i could do it now) and besides my own write-ups, it used to be filled with (cut and paste) articles from dailystar and cricinfo. I used to update the local league results religiously (i know zunaid bhai is going - why can't you do it now?).
I Was contacted by rivals group out of england as they were about to launch their sports site featuring the test teams and BD was getting good vibes about getting the teststatus (this was early 2000) and my contact suggested teststatus.com (url:
http://bangladeshcricket.rivals.net/...t.asp?sid=1175) and we decided to go with it. The first things I noticed (and the best thing yet) was a free forum and a chat room. It was just perfect. As I wrote earlier, fwullah became the first member and she started writing for the site and pretty soon our membership reached "5", then '10' within months (yes, I am being sarcastic but it was a slowwwwww start). Another person I met around this time was Raana bhai. He was working in Texas and he shared the same passion about the site that I had. We kind of thought that BD would be a force to reckon by 2004 (we were both wrong on that one, eheheh).
The site wasn't getting the numbers and rivals were cutting down on the cricket sites with only 3-4 test teams being allowed to carry on. It was time to move, we had a poll about what name to pick and banglacricket stuck (I swear to god that my memory is going bad - can the older members confirm this ? We may have had the poll later). We had to move out by the end of February 2002.
Despite rajputro's offer to host the site at kobitaogaan.com, I went with a hosting service that offered plenty of space and bandwidth and the biggest worry of all - A MESSAGE BOARD. That lasted a year and by this time we realized that we (me and raj) need more space even though the board membership was between 100-200. We picked a bigger hosting with bigger bandwidth and these people were criminals (sorry, that's kinda harsh). After getting shutdown couple of times, we decided to go with our own servers and that's where we are now. By the way - you can get your own homepage thru
banglacricket Hosting.
Just want to mention couple of thing. This used to be a one man show up until Raj bhai started to take a proactive role in the site design and management. He has made several changes to the site and some of you have seen those changes first hand. Thanks to him, the site management became extraordinarily easy and thus we were able to allow others to make direct contribution into the site.
By fall of last year, the message board was really picking up and this gentleman named chinaman started to become a regular (24/7 - how does he do that ?) in the site. I think he was personaly responsible for turning our long suffering lurker Zunaid. I have been in contact with him for the last 5-6 years but he really didn't join the site until early 2004 and again, i think it was the doing of C-man. Another kid that made BC interesting is Nasif (
fantasy/). If you haven't been to this section yet, you have seen nothing.
The best thing about BC are the members and each and every member, writer, staff, moderator and admin have made BC what it is today. You can find some of our behind the scene crew listed (will be updated soon with more contributors) in the
about ussection. You can also find the list of members (since our move in june 2002) in the
membersection. I just named 4/5 people and I feel guilty about it. I haven't even said a word about other long suffering members like pompous, Orpheus, Arnab, Sham (he has been MIA for a long time - bright kid), habibul-fan, pundit, piranha, Doorbin (our first contributor), and the ist goes on ....... to them, my sincerest apologies.
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Something interesting from teststatus. I believe this to be the very first article (it was probably a cut and paste from indepedent) in the teststatus site. This was dated April 8, 2000:
Bangladesh test report
If you have plenty of time to kill. Try this easy archive, you'll find stuff that you probably won't find anywhere else 9unless you really really REALLY dig for it):
Search for articles
(you can simply go to the site and click on story index).