Many have contributed to the sites success.
A special thank you to those that have helped with designing various things, running the site,
as well as moderating it.
In June of 1997 The Fox River Fishing Report came into being.
Starting as a homepage it grew in popularity when a bulletin board script was added.
Many asked if they could post about other areas they fished around the Chicago area.
We created different sections but the name of the website didn't fit though.
So in May of 1998 a domain name was purchased and the website became ChicagolandFishing.com
I would just like to interject here that before we became ChicagolandFishing.com
there were already spammers and one day I awoke to an email from someone who worked at night.
The email, said I should have a look at the Northern Illinois bulletin board.
I did right away and there I found a post with a XXX picture.
I removed the picture and all was good, but then I figured since this person worked at night I would
give him the passwords so he could delete any junk that was posted during the night.
So CLF had a moderator before they were even really called moderators.
CLF has undergone 3 major changes in that time.
Starting with the oldest, we put together some examples of how the website looked,
and below are some screenshots from through the years.
Included are things like how the logo took shape, how pictures used to be displayed,
and what the forums (called bulletin boards then) looked like.
Some of the names you may recognize as many are still around from back in the *old* days.
Many things have changed on the Internet, things like cable modems instead of dial-up modems.
This has allowed for things to be done that would have taken to long to load with a dial-up connection.
Many of the things we enjoy today didn't even exist when CLF started.
It was in the summer of 2000 that something new came to the Internet,
and we switched to the php system you see widley used by forums to this day.
Another thing that has come into being since CLF started that makes
our experience nicer are personal digital cameras.
Now we don't have to get film developed or use an instimatic, and then scan the pictures.
Some of the images are missing as we haven't been able to locate them anywhere.
Use your browsers back button to return after selecting an image to view.
The look of the original Fox River Fishing Report.(Started June 7, 1998)
The towns along the Fox River had links which opened to a report from that town.
As more and more locations were talked about, sections were added, each with their own page.
When the domain name ChicagolandFishing.com was purchased visitor had to redirected.
Visitors were redirected to the new place. This was the look of the splash page.
This is how the page looked that had all the links to various contents of CLF.
The old Fox River bulletin Board.
The old Sound Off bulletin Board, those that have been around will recognize a certain poster on there. ;-)
A couple of screenshots of how pictures were shown.
CLF then brought on a new look with something called an image map.
This was basically an image that had clickable areas on it.
In the winter we would switch the image to a winter version.
Both the summer and winter versions had a utilities page which had various helpful links.
Something similar to what our Member Services page is now.
The phpBB style of forums then came into being and CLF took on pretty much the look that you see today.
The following is a compilation of how the CLF logo evolved.
I hope you've enjoyed a trip down memory lane with us.
If anyone has recollections of different things and would like to see if they are still around,
let us know on the 10th Anniversary thread, we'll see what we can do to find them.
Back to the forums
