I don't like dishonesty.

On another page where people were praising a forum that no longer exists (or shouldn't), I had written, and added to, this:

2017 note:
I removed the link because the site now belongs to a Japanese site doing I don't know what, fortune telling or gambling or something.

2021 note:
In the past few couple of years, someone bought that URL back, and is posting (anonymously) VERY political things about unschooing, seemingly from a male perspective. I'm trying to remove any and all links to that, since it was bragged up so effusively in its first (of three, now) wholly different unschooling periods. (more, but not important)

I hadn't been to that forum for a few months, and went to look to see if I could find the name of the owner.

I found this, and it irritates me because it suggests this is 22 years of uninterrupted service, and it is VERY MUCH NOT SO.

We are an unschooling community for unschoolers from all over the world coming together to share our knowledge and experience unschooling. Unschooling.com was originally founded in 1998, over 22 years ago, and has been a valuable resource in the unschooling movement ever since. (here)
For one, it was not 1998, when that forum was created. When I find a more exact date I'll bring it, but I'm thinking it was 2000, or maybe late 1999. Home Education Magazine's forum might have been 1998, and this was a spin-off of that. It was first discussed at a small private conference/gathering in St. Paul, and if I find the dates of that, that was before the forum existed.

The history was NOT unbroken. It was abandoned at some point, and then revived, still by Mark and Helen Hegener of Home Education Magazine, and the second time Barb Lundgren was managing the forum, I believe (or selling advertising for it, or somehow was directly involved in its revival).

At some point then it was fallow again, Mark and Helen broke up, Home Education Magazine came to an end before long, and a Japanese company had the URL.

I don't know who owns it, but the person is being purposely misleading. On the same page quoted above there's a quote from Deb Lewis that was obtained from my page, and one from Joyce that came from my page or hers.

September 30, 1999. I think that's when the forum was opened. The Wayback Machine's earliest save is October 6, 1999 and in there, some of the folders are dated September 30, and were yet empty on October 6.

Maybe it was a typo, when their new intro said 1998, then.
It was NOT a typo to be claiming 22 years of continuous presence and service.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005, Deb Cunefare posted as an admin, saying (in part):
"The Unschooling.com site and message boards will be closed sometime this weekend. Because the message board software is unreliable and a space hog, the boards will not be transported to the new site. Please take the time to copy for your own use any threads you feel are important to save. The new Unschooling.com site will utilize a weblog interface instead of the message board interface currently in use.

I look forward to seeing you on the new Unschooling.com site. It will be announced on the HEM lists when it's up and running."

I don't know when it was revamped and restored, but then that one went quiet and the Hegeners did not maintain either site registration.

A mysterious clue: One of the consultants listed from April 2013 to January 2016 had this in his bio: "I’m a writer, speaker, husband and dad of a three-year-old boy in Fort Worth, Texas." That child stayed three until the forum disappeared in 2016, so I don't think it was being maintained very well in those years. (January 2016).
I can find that dad online, but there were no further homeschooling mentions in what I saw online. He wrote well-received books about Star Trek. That's cool.

The current/third incarnation seems to have started in April 2019. April is the earliest date I see in a Wayback Machine save from June 21, 2019. This is a graph from The Wayback Machine showing when they captured a page.
The spikes early on are when the forum was new and busy. In 2008 through 2011, there's a static holding page with no links. In late 2011, there's a "Welcome to the future home of..." screen, which was there with little variation for over a year. January 2013, different, but still a preview.

The even stuff in the middle is when it was back, but mostly links and not a busy forum. They were soliciting subscribers for what ultimatly became an online-magazine, and it seems in that last couple of years, nothing would change but the preview of the next issue.

The empty spot of several years was when it was Japanese (maybe for sale; I don't know what it said). I did get there from a link, a couple of times in those days, but I didn't save it and neither did the internet archive.

The bumps on the right-hand side are the new forum, that is claiming all of the other years, and I don't know who's doing it. The topics seem to be click-bait, honestly, and dangerous lunacy. Very few have anything to do with unschooling.

To get to the live version of that collection, click here. When you click a bar on the graph, it will open that year. Dates of saves will be marked. Click one. Within that, click the time. Within a screen links will work (many of them) but will go to the forum as it appeared that day (I think).

When I was working on these notes, some of the topics on the current anonymous forum are:

There's no court to appeal to to get them to stop, but if you have friends asking, feel free to share this evidence from the Internet Archive that "Unschooling.com was originally founded in 1998, over 22 years ago, and has been a valuable resource in the unschooling movement ever since" is not true. Twenty one years before that was written, there was a message board forum that lasted for a few years, and THAT was valuable.
On September 14, 2021, the closest the forum comes to identifying its owner is the "our admins" page, which lists "Unschooling JR" (one nameless admin).

Happy testimonials of the value of the REAL original forum at the beginning of the 21st century


SandraDodd.com