The first year of The BBQ Forum, amounted to the last two months of 1995.  The first full year of the forum therefore was 1996 and the message count started to pick up.  We had about 700 messages posted to the forum this first year.  The increase in traffic was directly related to people telling others about this forum on the Internet, about barbecue.  

We were all eager to try different things on this new media, the Internet.  In 1996 I tried out setting up Internet chat sessions.  I announced the times for the chat sessions and then some of us gathered together for about an hour to chat.  It didn't work very well.  The chat sessions amounted to about five or so of the people from The BBQ Forum gathering together for between 30 ~ 60 minutes.  We were all so busy typing we couldn't think much about what we were typing. So the content of the chat sessions was not very good.  At one of the chat sessions Vince Bilardo was the featured guest markh took an active part in the chat session.  In 1997 we had one chat sessions with Mike Scrutchfield as the featured guest and that was a much better session.  After that one I decided to give up on Internet Chat and stick to The BBQ Forum. 

However, even with the 700 message count for 1996 there were not a great deal of memorable messages that have made their way to this cookbook.  But what the message count lacked in quantity it more than made up for in quality.  The following links show the quality of what had started in 1996 and really started to flourish in 1997.