B3ta is a strange place for me.
I started just by reading the board and occasionally posting. Luckily I did not make a total twat of myself to start with. (That came later!) It says I joined four years, seven months and twenty six days ago, but I know that I lurked for a long time before I joined. I think I found you because I got bored with Something awful, their humour was just too nice and then I found you all. Your levels of sickness fitted with my own and I felt at home almost. In truth it took me many years and a lot of surgery before I felt comfortable to be myself and yet here at B3ta, I felt like I fitted in. I found QOTW while bored one day, I have answered a few times and even came first once (it was a quiet week, I am not that talented) which made me feel proud in a way that a Blue Peter Badge never could.

I love the links board, I love QOTW, I am scared of Talk and I still check the board every now and again. I look through image challenge and make my votes for images that make me laugh, wince or horrify my partner! Strangely, I have a few Facebook friends from here and every one of them is wonderful. Yet I am still here, a shy, nervous person who would probably not be able to speak to you if I met you in person. I finally got a good job and I can now afford an Icon next to my name too.

What blows me away is the talent that many of you have. Some days I am compelled to drop some of you a line just to say how much you rocked my world that day. The worst thing I have ever done though was to print out the Christmas Cracker jokes and use them. No one else saw the funny side and the Cancer joke (what is black and eats cunts? Cervical Cancer!) was too much for some at dinner. It was both the funniest and worst Christmas dinner ever!

Thank you B3tards, you have raised my spirits when they are low and you made me laugh until tears have rolled down my cheeks. I cannot think of higher praise for a website full of CDC obsessed oddballs who are as sick as you. I love you all, but only in an internet way. Happy Tenth Birthday. Love from
( Rev. Jayneflakes Buy my book, I need the cash for drugs and hookers, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 23:08, Reply)

9 years, 6 months
Working in one of the remaining 3 digital agencies post dot-com crash, all we did was play Unreal Tournament (why is that not available still - Deck-16 - awesome) and read / post to b3ta.

I feel old, and so I should, I'm nearly 40.

boooo :)
(jim, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 22:56, 1 reply)

Happy birthday!
I found b3ta through a mention of Buffy's Swearing Keyboard in Kerrang just after I'd started university in 2001. I wasn't having the greatest time at uni, finding the childhood-to-adulthood transition rockier than I'd necessarily anticipated, and the b3ta community was brilliant – I spent a great deal of that first year or so drunkenly smashing messages into it about how drunk/sad/depressed I was, and people were incredibly helpful, funny, practical, and willing to call me a cunt when I was being one. Eventually I slid out of that funk, and having b3ta as an outlet was definitely instrumental in that sliding. The virtual friendships I made in that time really helped kick me vaguely into shape. They also made me laugh my fucking head off regularly.
(Note: this was back when it was all fields, and there was no talk board, and it was acceptable to put "I'm drunk" as a post on the main board. Imagine doing that now. You'd be hanged.)
For several years I relentlessly posted a mixture of underwhelming images (MS Paint FTW), slightly crap poetry (RIP Stupid Bathroom) and an awful lot of pretty crap banter (I tried to make "Shut the fuck up, Ian" a catchphrase for a while). It was loads of fun.
I also went to several of the early bashes, and made half-formed clumsy semi-friendships, many of which exist to this day. When I moved to London in 2004 to ostensibly seek my fortune, I crashed in the flat of a fellow b3tan for the first few weeks. I had a site for years hosted for free by a fellow b3tan. The header on my bad poetry site was designed by a b3tan. I've had help with work, sponsorship for charity events, professional and personal advice and quite a lot of free drinks off b3ta.
More recently, and on a different note, I performed at two of the Sickipedia live events. I wouldn't have dreamed of doing that in any other environment, but knowing it all stemmed from b3ta meant I felt comfortable telling crap puns (the punchline to one joke was "Boutros Boutros Gnarly") on stage. In the last year I've also managed to get into the b3ta newsletter twice, which means I win the internet.
Ten years is a long time to be a part of something, however off-and-on. I'm incredibly grateful to be even a small part of it. Thanks to Rob and everyone else – you really created a beautiful monster.
( mikeisbrill, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 22:51, 4 replies)

i just remembered this
posssibly my finest moment
mictoboy.co.uk/thing/b3ta.com%20board.html
( mictoboy shitting in your cunt since, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 22:47, 3 replies)

Started on
/Main then briefly nipped into /talk *shudder* then now found myself lingering in /links.

basically I'm slowly making my way to the /faq.
(mr-lizard Hell's teeth man!, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 22:41, Reply)

Maybe its legs just had grow
The first thing I saw in b3ta was Weeble's Potatos flash animation, some 8 years ago. After I dug out all the flash stuff in the site, I went to the board (there was only one for pictures, links and chat... the /talk board was created shortly after). And there I found a place to call "home" on the interwebs. All these years were marked with comes and goings, but I always knew where to go to have some good laugh or find an inspiration or even advice. Members also come and go, but the spirit remains essentially the same.

You will never leave. I didn't.
(Monocromatico Lady Godiva's horse, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 22:40, 1 reply)

a member for 9 years, 7 months and 7 days

My first b3ta post...

I'd met Rob and Cal through UK Bloggers c2000/01, so was vaguely aware of b3ta from it's inception or thereabouts.
I used to get the newsletter from quite early on, long before I actually realised there was a message board!

Anyway I decided to enter the challenge one particular week "Photoshop This Eye" - and started posting from there on in.
I pretty much learned on a ntk basis, and there's little that compares to the rush of a Front Page :)

A couple of months later I went to a b3ta bash where I met hugo_rune, we subsequently made lots of silly stuff on b3ta
and elsewhere, met many truly lovely and thoroughly barking b3tans and drank ludicrous amounts of booze.

Now we have 3 kids and live in Ireland. I'm so grateful to the internet that I am still in touch with quite a few people
from the olden days. We had all teh funs didn't we? :)
( popt_art, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 22:34, 15 replies)

I came here to ask a question
I suppose I was vaguely aware of b3ta since the very early days, first having home internet in the early 00s, and having a lot of geeky friends despite not being very geeky myself. I remember watching all of Joel Veitch's classic stuff on rathergood.com when it was new. A dear and now sadly absent friend once sent me "The Boss is a Cunt" to cheer me up when I was having a crap time with work. More recently I followed a link to the 2008 presidential election image challenge and I think that was my first exposure to b3ta proper.

Then about ooh... two years ago I found on Youtube a little compilation of cheeky gifs based on the Roundhay Garden Scene (the first ever piece of motion picture footage). There are quite a lot of parodies of it out there and most of them are rubbish, but these ones were really witty. The whole thing was set to Taco's version of Puttin' on the Ritz. I liked it fairly well.

Then, in December last year, I fancied watching it again, but it seemed to have disappeared from Pootube. It occurred to me maybe it had been a b3tan's project, or at least some b3ta folk might know something about it. After a glance around /board I decided that, in any case, b3ta was clearly A Good Thing and The Place to Be. I swiftly joined, and after pulling up a metaphorical chair, shopping a kitten onto Steve Jobs's head and showing very little sign of ever leaving, I actually forgot all about the Roundhay Garden thing.

To be honest, it was probably shit anyway, and it just seems good in my two-year-old memory of it.

Having said that, if anyone does know what it is I'm on about, and could reply with a link, it would at least provide closure on my frankly rather banal reason for coming to this wonderful site.
( Photoshop Bitch 2014 edition, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 22:33, 3 replies)

yeah, you had this site in 1998/1999
i stopped visiting when you revamped because I couldnt work out where all the pictures went!
( SkUG >_O i got a couple of stitches in my eyeball... ow, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 22:31, Reply)

10 years ago I searched the internet looking for a picture of Bernie Clifton
Instead I found you lot and look how that turned out.
( PeterSeychelles, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 22:30, Reply)

Happy b'day
9 years, 10 months and 14 days ago I stumbled across B3ta as a way of passing lunchtimes when it was too wet to go outside and play. I think finding it might have had something to do with Popbitch. In any case I found a web site made from pure fun with a refreshingly whimsical take on life, the perfect antidote to the post dot-com, post 9-11, doom that many web designers faced at the time.
B3ta you've made me laugh and continue to make me laugh 10 years on. Long may you continue.
(anat0010, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 22:05, Reply)

I'd seen rob poncing about on the telly,
but never really knew why he was there.
Someone showed me b3ta and I'm none the wiser.
( 4Q just lurking, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 22:03, 1 reply)

all you old school fuckers need to come back and post
so many names that were the reason i stayed around, and then you all fucked off

/checks armpit smell
( mictoboy shitting in your cunt since, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:59, 17 replies)

5 years, 2 months and 12 days
Christ. In that time I have got married, had two kids, changed career and relocated to another city.

In B3ta terms I have attended one B3ta bash in Birmingham, one very mini-bash in Portsmouth, made loads of internet friends, met some of them in real life, lost some of them before I ever really knew them, had a few QOTW popular pages (never a first post or a most popular post), one QOTW newslettered, had one image challenge popular page (not top,)designed a goatse mug several years before I saw the real pottery ones, thought of a metric fuckton of ideas for images that I've not made, made a load of images that I probably shouldn't have bothered with...

Still nothing quite gets me like a good run of funny images, especially in circumstances where I have to be quiet... the building tension of scrolling down the page and seeing something funny that sets you off, then something else and the silent shaking begins, then a third that will push you over the edge into a silent, puce, quivering mass as the rest of the office looks at you funny and asks if you're feeling alright and you try to explain, pathetically, half gasping, exactly why it is that a picture of a chair, with a fuckoff great big caption in Impact is so funny.

One day, my workload will win, but while there's still blood in my veins I'm damned if I'm going to stop B3ta-ing!
( Sonic James Doom forgetting the date since... umm..., Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:58, Reply)

3 years, 8 months, 2 days
Introduced to b3ta by the guy who yells ZEBRA FUCKER on rathergood's swearing keyboard.

B3ta is my, and I'm sure many others', place to come when they're feeling a bit shit. Friendly messages when I've lost a pet, funny stories to read after a breakup, feeling a genuine connection with people who are willing to share very personal stories about their life with us.

Thanks B3ta, you've helped a lot.
(bobman500 enjoys a grope as much as the next fella, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:56, Reply)

rob's 10th anniversary lap of honour


( Clay hopes this bit is long enough to promote my websi, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:51, 4 replies)

4 Years 7 Months and 1 Day
A mate showed me this site at school, and had a wee look pretty much every day :)
( RossThePiper Stretch Armstrong is my Father, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:50, Reply)

9 years, 1 month and 11 days
Christ, never mind having a child, that's something that makes me feel old.

I tell you what hooked me on b3ta: the community element. Someone put up a photo of George W Bush (ask your parents) leaning to one side in a cabinet meeting, having 'shopped in Emu, whispering into his ear. Within minutes, someone had taken that photo of Bin Laden with his hand aloft, cropped it, and made it look like he was wearing Sooty. I thought, "We're going to have fun here..."

The point is this: I like bag, please.
(martian, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:32, 2 replies)

Just found this on the internet...
It's from my first ever bash. I'm not on any of the photos, mainly because I was wankered on vodka and slunk off early with Badger. Ahem.

www.kamikazestoat.co.uk/bashdec2004/
( Wicca'd Witch needs ideas for a new sig on..., Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:31, 3 replies)

Well...
A few days ago, my boyfriend's cat disappeared for hours and hours. When it eventually returned, it was fine, but someone had shaved its fur off. On further investigation, I found out that other local cat owners had the same thing happen to their kittens.

My first thought on finding this out was not to wonder what the fuck is going on around here, but to hope like hell that the next QOTW would be about kittens.

...and that pretty much sums up how B3ta has warped my mind.
(Sivvus trolley collision in the fruit aisle led to a jam, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:29, Reply)

9 Years 11 Months 25 Days
Well I managed to hide out on B3ta for a whole 3 days before Wifey tracked me down and moved in as a mod. First found out about B3ta from Jada. It was quite the best thing I had ever seen on the internet and really made me rethink everything I thought I knew about it. To draw a cultural parallel between the web and say music, Blode and Jada were like an Elvis, Beatles, Sex Pistols or Nirvana, shaking up all that had gone before. Up to that point Flash was the preserve of dull opening pages on corporate sites. After B3ta it was the engine of viral silliness. They made me realise that websites didn't have to be about anything to be brilliant fun and absorbing. And B3ta was online community were it all happened.
It inspired me to do a web thingy which try as I might to fill with Flash and silly pictures actually turned out to be all about tea and biscuits.
Mark my words one day BBC 4 will make a documentary about all of this I expect.
( nicey, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:29, 9 replies)

Almost the very definition of a lurker I am
On here almost every day for the last 4 years, 1 month and 24 days.

I've done 3 Posts including this one - the other two were a bit poo tbh..

You don't deserve me.
(King Nightmare, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:27, Reply)

Blimey I nearly missed it!
Happy Birthday b3ta! (Was it really launched the day after 9/11? You'd think everyone would be too busy buying all the newspapers and gawking).

Anyway, no idea how I found it but very glad I did. I know I lurked accountlessly for years, then lurked with an account, then actually said something, then finally made my first image for the Tarsiers compo.

The standards on b3ta (artistically one end of the spectrum, morally the other) never fail to amaze me. There are some outstandingly talented people on here and there are people like me with minimal skills who still raise a titter now and then, and that's just the way I like it.

Well done everyone.
( thecrapgatsby isn't listening LALALALALALA, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:25, Reply)

8 years, 5 months and 20 days. Christ.
used to regularly check punchbaby.com for new 'funny' vids. Once I bothered to check their links page, found rathergood, and through that the b3ta board. Got an FP within 2 hours of signing up and I was hooked.

Made some excellent internet friends, some of whom I consider to be excellent real life friends, no matter how far away they are or infrequently we communicate.

That all sounds a bit gay for a website where the principle currency is cocks and badgers.
( mictoboy shitting in your cunt since, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:21, Reply)

Boring. Skip me.
(6y 4m 21d) with lurkage of a year or so. Introduced by my office mate. These creative web types know all the best places. Lurked for ages believing that I wouldn't be funny enough to contribute. Eventually realised this was pretty much a pre requisite for members so signed up there and then.

Never has so much time been wasted by so many doing so little and so enjoyably. Happy b3taday.
( number5 has been fighting tramps and losing., Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:21, Reply)

5 Years, One Month 30 Days.

This site nearly got me sacked from a succession of dull office jobs, whilst making them bearable enough that I didn't crush my skull in the lid of the photocopier. Now, sadly, I have a grown up(ish) job and have to actually do work and can't dick around on here for days at a time.

My first day on here was 'No Goats Thursday' with all the hilarity that provided.

Never was any good at shopping or owt, but my most proudest moment was suggesting that a very prominent member was a 'Pedantichrist'... seems it stuck... wonder if they remember that?

Happy 10 Fuckers!
( Spenface ALWAYS hangs in the Buffalo Stance, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:17, Reply)

I got me B3ta name (and indeed the name I use for all toons ect) when I was quite badly ill. I did not know it but a blood clot was travelling through me veins and ended up blocking the flow to the Greater Omentum (we all have one - except me now). Anyway it became twisted, went gangrenous and major surgery removed it (see pic at bottom of profile). Scary bit is the blood clot could easily have ended up in the heart and - well..

Anyway - Twisted Omentum was adopted. I needed a lot of time off after the surgery and Wifey (a long tuime lurker) suggested I have a lookey. First post was a cartoon of Tony Christie asking a stupid question. Never looked forward since. Ta B3ta. You saved my sanity when I was losing it then took it when I was off guard :)
( The Twisted Omentum vidi vici veni, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 21:01, Reply)

9 years, 6 months and 26 days
10 years, If I had killed Rob I would have been released by now.

I can't remember how I found B3ta, it just sort of happened.
I had just started work on switchboard and probably spent the majority of my day (and the next 3 or 4 years) lurking, posting and generally arsing about on B3ta, anything to break me out of the general monotony of my working life.
The one major thing, apart from a quite a lot of work (yay), that I took from B3ta (and still do actually) is the pleasure of getting to know the most ridiculous, genius, idiotic, puerile, funniest and loveliest group of lunatics it has been my pleasure to know.
Keep going B3ta. Loves yooz.
( bovine I'm so old, even my old is old, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 20:43, 3 replies)

The greatest thing that b3ta has provided me....
....the ability to spell the word Morrisons.

Thank you.
(rhyswynne - on every social network mullarkey known to man, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 20:36, 2 replies)