[BadScript]

If you guys just wanted a short answer skip to the last two paragraphs, else read:

This forum used to be hosted on a perl version of ubb, Ultimate Bulletin Board.

As you may know, ubb ultilize something called a flat-file database (if you dont know what it is take a look <a href=http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/F/flat_file_database.html>here</a>, if you're too lazy it's just kinna like a huge excel spreadsheet); and at one point the site traffic is so heavy, about 20x more heavy then the current load I would say, that no machine in the world (or that I could afford) could handle that kinna traffic with a ff db powered forum.

The solution is to move from ubb perl/semi-colin seperated text file to phpBB php/mysql. But at that time there were already thousands of members registered, and some of the more dedicated members swore that they would hire a hitman to "deal with the situation" should I decide to remove all records and start over again.

Back then I had little knowledge and patient on the phpBB db structure, so I downloaded one of those database converter script and decided to try my luck. All goes well, except that the "join date" column on the user table did not get imported at all, so the default value 000000000000 were used instead.

Now the zero(s) value in the timestamp would actually correspond to 00:00:00 1 Jan 1970 GMT; EST is GMT -5 and therefore all EST systems subtract 5 hours from that day so it became 31 dec 1969.

Basically, every member who registered before the migration would have 31 Dec 1969 as his/her join date.

So there ya go.