With the recent influx of new members thanks to onipar's YouTube channel, I thought it would be interesting to see how everyone found the site. I'm always fascinated by how websites grow. 

Vaporman's tempting offer. Yes, Vapor made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

vaporman offering me one of these.

I think it was a combination of a plug from vkimo and seeing Ghost of Vapor on the forums.

What pushed me over the edge was the fact that my articles on RJ got all screwed up during the website redesign fiasco.  

Yeah, I think a lot of the initial growth in membership was at least partly due to the sentiment of members of RJ following the redesign fiasco echidna mentions. That and I was working overtime to invite anyone I could, making sure not to sound as though I was trying to "steal" them from other forums/sites, but simply offering yet another place to add to their rotation of nostalgia sites (which has unfortunately grown smaller through the years it seems).

After the core members started doing what they like and do best (Caps submitting videos to grow the library, crow making interesting threads for forum conversation and blueluigi bringing us his extensive gaming knowledge, Benjanime, shakin, vkimo, and pikachulover creating fun articles, then we started getting some love from search engines.

That was our humble beginning. Thankfully others saw what was going on here and joined the fun. Some come and make a big splash, only to disappear (DoctorRyan, Silvervix), but our core seems pretty solid, and has grown with time. Now it includes the likes of massreality, Hoju Koolander, echidna, and TDitH. That core group keeps this place going through the lean times.

And some newer members like mickyarber, comic_book_fan, jkatz, and others have been pretty active.

The enthusiasm from the "new blood" injected by Onipar is fun to see too. So far I'm glad to see kidcoffee and ozzyrulz777 digging in and getting right to "work". Hopefully it turns into something lasting. Time will tell.

Oh, and in answer to the OP question... I invited myself.

I saw a post on RJ, and I decided to check it out. I felt too intimidated to post articles on RJ plus it seemed like everything under the sun had been written about there. 

My thread here has helped attract people.

http://www.retrojunk.com/community/post/index/52769

I don't remember exactly how I found retro-daze.  I'm pretty sure it was a year ago, and I heard about either the Halloween writing contest or the Halloween "theater" show, and I had planned to get involved back then.  Things got busy, and when I got the email about the video game goodie pack, I finally got involved.  Funny enough, i still never ordered that.  :-p  

I knew about the site from Vape's activity on RetroJunk. At first I didn't join because I was still "loyal" to RJ. But after realizing that Vertex truly didn't care about the site or it's members, I finally joined about 3 months or so after Retro-Daze went online. I'm really glad some of the veterans moved over here, I'm sure if The Daze was around longer we could have got some of the great members who left earlier.

Anyone remember Achilles? He was one of the great RJ writers, he runs http://www.jamescamerononline.com/ now.

If I remember correctly, I got an e-mail or private message from Vapor inviting me to check it out.  And of course i saw the postings on Retrojunk.  I had only posted a few articles there and wasn't really a part of the "community".  I came here and liked what I saw and have participated a lot more here than I ever did there.  I really like the man running things here and how he steers things.

mickyarber wrote :

I really like the man running things here and how he steers things.
-end quote

Awww shucks.