Happy Birthday to Us! - 1 Year Today

[Clariman]

Happy Birthday to the Lemon Fool Community

It is hard to believe that it was only one year ago when The Motley Fool announced its closure. In a matter of a few days (possibly just a few hours), we created The Lemon Fool website, with the primary objective of keeping the Foolish community together. Who would have thought that we would have over 3,000 registered users and over 90,000 posts a year later?

So we would like to say a huge “thank you” to all who have come on this journey with us - and to those who have found us since. We would also like to say an even bigger “thank you” to our team of Moderators who give up their free time to keep all of us in order. It is not an easy task and they do a great job. This site could not continue without their efforts. Thank you.

We are intent on keeping this site free to use, but are very appreciative of those who take out a voluntary subscription.

If you wish to say “thanks” to The Lemon Fool for the continued Foolish chat, then the Donation (voluntary subscription) button is the most practical way of doing so. Here is a link to make it even easier app.php/donate

That said, verbal “thankyous” are appreciated too!

If you wish to comment, please use this thread viewtopic.php?f=21&t=8212

Best Wishes
Stooz and Clariman

[Clariman]

How TLF Started - The fateful 24 hours on 3rd November 2016

In early November 2016, The Motley Fool announced that it was going to close its discussion boards – initially to new posts, but then completely.
On 3rd November (the same day?) at 15.38 Clariman sent Stooz an SMS message saying,

Hi Stooz. Are you still on this number? TMF boards are closing down. I’m retiring at Christmas. I can feel a project coming on??? Clariman

Stooz replied within a minute saying

Yes I’m still here. Sad to see the end of TMF. Where did all the users go?

To which Clariman replied

A load are still there and sad!

Throughout the next few hours, we thrashed out some ideas, decided on a name and at 1 minute to midnight (8 hours after my initial SMS message); Stooz sent a link to http://www.lemonfool.co.uk ! Wow! How did he do that?!

The creation and timing of TLF was very fortunate. Clariman had pretty much stopped full time work and was beginning to get a bit bored. We had created our first website together in 2005 (http://www.stoozing.com) but Clariman had dropped out around 2010 because of pressures of work, but Stooz had kept it ticking over.

What we had learned from that experience was that we each worked very differently – so differently that it could have easily been incompatible, but it was exactly the opposite – it worked really well. Stooz just does stuff and does it quickly. Clariman has an attention to detail and a desire for a quality product that could stop things dead in their tracks (until its perfect). The combination of ideas (from both), speed of execution (Stooz) and desire for quality (Clariman) is a great combination – even if we say it ourselves.

If the opportunity and idea came today, would it happen? I think it is doubtful that we would have had the time to do it, but we are all the better from the timing and set of circumstances that made this all possible. Our busy-ness is reflected in that these celebratory posts come to you rather late on our birthday!

Thanks again for your support.

Clariman and Stooz