Can any admin write about how it started and the first weeks, How you got people here? 
Would be cool to know 
READ WASTED’S POST INSTEAD.
I’m not an admin, so sorry for that post.
Back in the time, there was Project Dolphin, but it was ended after a year. After that, projects with the spirit of Dolphin started like Project Orca, new Project Dolphin, and WhatPulse.
That’s what I know. I would be happy to hear some stories from the start of WhatPulse too.
I was a regular with the PD staff back in the day. The founder wanted to shut down because of the server costs weighing down and we (we had a team for WhatNET) did not want to stop key counting, so the founder was convinced to open source the project before shutting down completely. I grabbed that source and recreated the website (the PD site was in perl, yuck), put it online as pulse.whatnet.org and we started using it for the WhatNET team.
But word got out and a lot of the old PD users registered as well. Orca grabbed some users as well, but lack of activity there let that sink. We added click counting and our numbers soared from ± 50 users to about 5000 in a month 2 or 3. People inviting other people, forming teams, people blogging, etc, caused it to grow steadily to what we are now.
Okey, cool!
This is a great success story for anyone. Networking online is a big reason why most sites like yours have succeeded. If this happened a few years before the 20th century though you may not expect as much swift progress like you experienced. Thanks for sharing!