A recent geeklist on BGG enumerated the history of the site and how it’s changed over time.
From Tom Vasel’s Interviews by an Optimist #32: Scott Alden:
“During one of the Metrogamers game sessions, I mentioned to Derk that I was running this website and with a little modification and hacking I could get it working for board games. . . . wouldn’t that be cool!? He was interested, because he was also coming up with game categorization and a rating scheme for board games. We decided to merge forces where I would program the site, and Derk would pump in content. We initially used Derk’s Metrogamer session reports and some reviews written by Metrogamer Neil Carr and himself. Initially we had about 100 articles and enough content to launch BoardGameGeek in January 2000.”
Aldie posted a comment about this month’s traffic that struck me as amazing:
This month is seeing about 25,000 visitors/day with 86,000 registered.
Makes you wonder how many lurkers there are that haven’t registered…