Roller Coaster Talk was a part of Yahoo Groups for many years.

Starting out as Coaster Talk on the original RollerCoaster.com website run by Bob Coker in the early days of the World Wide Web on the internet. It was a very popular email list at the time (those were a thing back in the day), similar in some ways to use.net but standing on it’s own with membership of 1000 or more individuals and lively discussion.

When the website shut down in early 2001, we knew that we had to preserve the wonderful community that we had there. So after some looking around a handful of the moderators decided that the newly established Yahoo Groups looked like a great place to move our list, giving us everything that we had at the time and a lot more, including the opportunity the share files, photos, and more.

And so “Roller Coaster Talk” was born on Yahoo Groups on Mar 12, 2001, with me as the technical head, but with the continuing leadership, moderation, and really the vast majority of the work being done by Nate Kohlrush, Josh Woszny, Chris Kersing, Jay Ducharme, Adam Sandy and others, as well as the wonderful regular contributor like Jeremy Daniels, Brian Farral (Quack!), Jeremy Norris, and so many others, the list not only continued but it thrived, at one point having well over 1000 members (my aging memory wants to say it was closer to 2000 but I can’t verify that) and lots of active discussions, meets, and friendships born out of the list.

But as things do, new forms of getting together, discussing, learning, and building relationships form, and old ones slowly begin to die. With the advent of message boards and forums attached to websites, and then social media and “groups” on sites like Facebook, and the rise of Reddit, we watched our list slow down, dwindle and gradually fade away, as did most other email lists.

finally Yahoo announced that on Dec 15, 2020 all of their groups would be discontinued. The archives wiped. And all record of them would be lost.

But we managed to download almost everything. The photos. The files. And most importantly the discussions. And I have them here for you to enjoy and have a look back (and in many cases laugh) at what we put together!

The messages are all in a long (really long. as in massively long) text files. It would be wonderful if someone could sort and organize them. But as they are you can see the discussions just as we saw them and responded to them way back in the day.

I hope you enjoy our look back and our memories.