qpr.org is, I believe, fifteen years old today, although there's some dispute about that... we could be even older.

QPR.ORG was founded by Ben Humphry back in the early days of the public Internet.  Towards the end of 1996, a few members of the pre-existing QPR Mailing List worked on providing our club with a decent web presence.  The club itself had no website, and all that existed at the time were a couple of fan pages dedicated to the club.  The QPR.ORG domain was acquired by Ben on January 11th 1997, and the site went live that day.  

Over time QPR.ORG expanded and included sub-sites for A Kick Up The R's, QPR Ladies and Accrington Stanley Bowles FC.  Through various guises, the board became hugely popular, and by 2005, it was getting literally thousands of visitors every day.

The sheer popularity of the site nearly led to its demise in 2007(?).  The servers and software hosting the site weren't terribly robust, and after a couple of disasterous server failures, one moderator took the decision to redirect visitors to his own website.  Ben was battle weary, having spent far too much time trying to manage the failing servers, and having just been made redundant, both from his own website and his place of employment, decided it was time to throw in the towel.

A few months later, refreshed and re-employed, Ben looked to launch a new website using better software, hardware and moderators.  Despite having lost all members to the new board, a number of the more discerning and erudite former members returned to the new QPR.ORG, creating a close-knit community.  As a result, whilst it remains fairly small, it can perhaps be considered a little more mature and cultured than is usual on football message boards.

QPR.ORG has expanded beyond its messageboard roots, with a hugely popular Twitter news service at @QPRORG and a link shortening service at QPR.NU (now linked with bit.ly).  It has one of the best QPR news gathering services, and now also gathers videos and photos from around the Internet.

As the board continues to evolve (having just gone through another major facelift), it is planning some exciting new features in time for its 15th birthday in January... watch this space!

A new feature, and a new fix (only applicable to new version of site):

• Reply titles are now visible.
• Latest match photos are shown across the top of the front page - clicking on a photo brings up a lightbox version.

Expect a few more cool features soon... I have a few nice ideas to test out.

So, yes, I've made a few changes -

• a new theme (if you don't like it, you can change your theme back to the old one on the 'My Profile' link ---->)
• more social media integration (login with Facebook, follow Twitter channel, etc.)
• Pictures in the newsfeed

Every time I make changes, everyone hates it - so please feel free to say how much you hate it.

Possibly, maybe... watch his space.

1. Karma is back and working
2. The news system has been completely rebuilt.
3. A few small changes to the forum itself ('what's new' view has previews of the messages when you hover, etc.)

Over the next 24 hours or so, I'll be performing some site maintenance, getting the board up to Premier League spec.

We've had a couple of minor issues recently - these have been fixed and, even better, a few other problems were also identified, so the site should be running much faster now.

I've made the editor more useful by allowing text to be...

bold, italic, underlined, coloured, different sizes, etc.

and of course, better paragraphing is allowed, so text can now be aligned left, right, centre or justified