Anyone know

[Grant_Vicat]

Who originally started this forum? I am I think 3 years in this Christmas, hard to believe as I never really do forums. This one is lovely. That's a point how long have folks been on here x

April 2017 - I completely agree with you about this Forum x

 

[Lupf]

Who originally started this forum? I am I think 3 years in this Christmas, hard to believe as I never really do forums. This one is lovely. That's a point how long have folks been on here x

I happened to land on this thread and found this question, so I got curious.
According to Wikipedia, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes.co.uk
Diabetes.co.uk was founded in 2003, by Arjun Panesar after his grandfather was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
Arjun Panesar is founder and CEO of DDM - Digital Diabetes Media
and an honorary lecturer at the medical school at Warwick University.
in the following article from 2019 he tells the story of founding diabetes.co.uk 16 years earlier, see

Diversity and Innovation: Arjun Panesar - NHS Innovation Accelerator

NIA Fellow Arjun Panesar, Founder CEO of Diabetes Digital Media and the Low Carb Program, shares his thoughts on innovating within the BAME community. I have been inspired by the lack of services available not only for the BAME community, but also the wider type 2 diabetes community. I was...

nhsaccelerator.com

According to a post by @AndBreathe Arjun Panesar's handle on the forum is @Administrator

 

[Chris24Main]

The early history is also mentioned in Gary Taubes latest book "the case for keto". It was quite a nice surprise to read that.

 

[sgm14]

I got curious so I did some searching.
The oldest thread I could find was started on oct 24 2006: https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/outing-false-claims-diabetes-companies.36/ but it doesn't look like this was the start of the forum.
One particular post in that thread implied that this forum was some sort of follow up from another forum: "We do have one contributor to this site (Karen, I think it was) who on the old forum told of her treatment for type 2 diabetes". (https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/outing-false-claims-diabetes-companies.36/post-5833)

I realise this is an old post, but the thread has just been revived and so has taken me down a rabbit hole.

According to internet archive wayback machine the domain name was registered before Feb 1999, but the first website wasn't published until Dec 2001

The website was redesigned in Feb 2003 which includes a link to a eforum which is obviously about diabetes despite the domain name.

Another redesign was done around Feb 2006

Oct 2006 still has the old forum, but also adds a link taking you to the 'the new Diabetes forum' and that includes the thread you mentioned (although that is from a snapshot from Jul 2007)

The old forum did seem to continue until Apr 2008 but somewhere in between the new forum became the default.

Depending on how the websites were designed some of the links on the websites or forums may not work, so you can read some of the old forum messages, but not all of them.