SHeesh. Stop it. :P It was a group effort!
The back story is pretty simple.... Long time ago, galaxy far, far away... Or sometime about 3 years ago, on Earth (take your pick)...
1) Ben (SVOboy) and Matt hung around talking about Honda fuel economy on hondatech. After being ridiculed and misunderstood by the fast & furious crowd, Ben talked Matt into starting up the gassavers.org forum so they could talk about efficiency without offending anyone.
2) I didn't know about gassavers, but around the same time, I bought Firefly #1 and started posting about fuel economy geekery at MetroMPG.com.
3) Someone on gassavers linked to one of my posts, so I went over and signed up. About 5,000 posts and some time later, it became evident that Matt wasn't interested in the forum any more. The moderators were pretty much running the shop. So Ben & I offered to buy the site from Matt so we could officially and legally take it over - the content, the database, the software licenses. He agreed! Then he reneged! (And later sold it to someone else who immediately posted water-4-gas type ads in the header
)!
4) So we packed our bags, and headed off on our own. EcoModder resulted. Some members, plus several moderators whom you know, came along.
The forum's official birthday is December 3, 2007:
The very first public post made after the forum went "live" to the whole interwires was post #3 in this thread:
An Index of Cycling Links
(The thread itself was started by Ben before the site was actually open. The actual very first post -- #1 in the database -- was made in the moderators special secret area on November 15, 2007 -- EM's "unofficial birthday".)
The first thread started by someone other than an admin/moderator after launch was, appropriately:
Living with Expensive Gasoline