I signed up here at Mahalo March 22nd 2009 but really did not start using Mahalo Answers right away but once I did I was hooked. My first best answer was on May 10th, 2009 and from then on I was hooked. The number one difference I notice between then and now is the size of our Mahalo population. When I look back to this time last year and last summer I remember a much much smaller community. We are huge in comparison now.

Since Mahalo has from my day one been a dynamic community and a dynamic website there has never been much time to get used to one feature or another before that feature or features change or get replaced with other features. ConundrumLand, Team Tipping, Anonymous questions, none of these were here this time last year... neither were revenue sharing, Tweet sharing questions, vertical managers, or the how to team et al.

I remember being able to build pages at whim, claim any single page I wanted (no QC team), and learning the use the Mahalo Twitter import tool as the first of my Mahalo Tasks. The Answer of the Day, the Question of the Day, and the Archive of the Week were all contests within Mahalo Answers last year.

There are a few blog postings online from 2007 and later that chronicle the changes within Mahalo over time and are an interesting read for Mahalo users new or old.

Mahalo Blog | Mahalo Greenhouse: You’re here to help. June 13th 2007

Mahalo Blog | Mahalo Answers – The Community Expands! January 13th, 2009

Take a look at Jason, Jeff, Easyeboy, Tracebooks and others all as top ranking purple belts. When I started there were a lot of green belts filling in the top 100 members lists.

http://blog.mahalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/top-10-members.jpg

Taking a look back in time on these blog postings and all of the other invaluable postings contained within this Mahalo Blog will really bring a perspective as to how far we have come, how much we really have changed, and how much of the central defining positive attitude of the Mahalo web community has stayed the same throughout.

Oh wow - things have changed.

I can't go way, way back - I've only been a member since January of 2009. The community had already started to take root when I showed up and that community was one of the reasons that I stuck around.

I was however the 3rd Black Belt and was perhaps one of the most active members of Mahalo Answers until October of 2009 when I made a conscious decision to spend my free time on Mahalo as an active Page Manager to learn about the then exciting new initiative.

What are some of the differences?

1)
The community was much smaller. Everyone knew everyone else.

2)
There weren't a lot of problems. But this was because we didn't have as many features, not because the system was better.

3)
There was more competition. This was a lot of fun for me. When M$2 questions were auto funded, there was literally a race to create a fast and in-depth answer. Back in the day, Easyeboy, Philipy and Dr Matt would beat me so often that I'd get frustrated. I remember spending a whole afternoon reading their answers to figure out how and where to beat them before they posted an answer :)

4)
The rewards somehow seemed more valuable. We were singled out for "being good" frequently. Brown and Black belt tests were special. Those first few Black Belts were announced and awarded by @Jason himself but more then that, they felt like they had a meaning beyond points.

5)
There was no negativity. This is a big one for me. There were no negative processes, no reprimands, no detention, no "do this or else", nothing. Just "come here and help people". When the first person decided to leave Mahalo Answers, it was a huge deal to the community. We were in shock. Now, it's common.

6)
Perhaps the biggest change is Page Management. Users can not only answer questions but they can create pages as well. This provided an exceptional opportunity for a number of people and engaged a very large audience as the program succeeds.

For me - those are the things that have changed. My view is from my own perspective and could easily be skewed. I'm interested to hear how everyone else answers this question.

Hi there :) Boy - there have been a LOT of changes over the past 3 years :)

I started working for Mahalo in the "Greenhouse" building pages back in April or so of 2007. Our beloved @Lon qc'd my first page on the Zodiac Killer that took me three days to write! In June (?), Mahalo started the first batch of mentors... I think there were 3 of us? And Lon recommended me for it. Instead of writing pages, I then spent most of my time qc'ing pages that new Greenhouse members wrote, and helping to teach them to develop better pages... I was soon joined by @bernices, @ssmacd, @lesliec, @lauriem, @angieh... oh gosh... the list is kinda endless! With the mentor program, @rpak was our "fearless leader". He and crief are the only remaining corp staff from the original group (I think).

During that time... I mentored the sports vertical with crief, the finance vertical with raj, literature with Laura, health with Daryn and kept pushing to be allowed to do Belief and Thought (spirituality) pages, which were considered too controversial at the time. I think I wrote/mentored about 10,000 pages! Phew!

As the Greenhouse continued to build pages, some of us were pulled away into the remote full time guides program... I think @bernices, @ssmacd and I were the first to work the buzz room... and were quickly joined by @lesliec, @lauriem, @angieh, @joyannj and a ton of other peeps. We were such a wreck about writing on the live site instead of the safety net that was the Greenhouse! Then some of us split out into the updates team in winter of 2008. We did fun stuff... (remember operation rabbit hole!) and hung out in chat and worked... and built some amazing friendships :)

In March 2008 (I think), I started working with Mark Burnham and @evand on the video games team... coordinating all of the video game buzz and walkthrough writing. At its peak, we were coordinating the efforts of 8 full and part time guides who were busy writing pages!

When the RFTG program began to end to make way for what is now the page/vertical management program, I started writing walkthroughs as a freelancer. I think that was in April of 2009... so I spent the summer playing video games with my then 14 year old son... and writing walkthroughs. An amazing summer for sure! :D

And that kept me busy until the start of the VM program in Dec of 2009. Lots of changes along the way... I have had an amazing 3 years with Mahalo... and made some incredible friendships.

Mahalo has gone through a lot of changes over the years. It used to not be a community website at all, there was a time when all the pages were built by full time staff who worked at the Mahalo Compound in Santa Monica. There were dozens of them.

Eventually, Mahalo started the Greenhouse and Remote Guide program, I don't know the exact number but it felt like there was at least 20 in house guides and 20 remote guides all working on different departments of page building.

Page Building was a major part of Mahalo in 2007-08, pages were all built by hand, not just the guide notes and fast facts but every link section on the page including News, videos, blogs you name it. Before the major part of page building was finding the related links on the web to put on your page.

I built a few pages like this, like David Attenborough and James Burke back during that long forgotten time. With Lon gone there are no more employees from that original time with the company beyond Jason and a few Vertical Managers, like myself.

In 2008 I worked for "Mahalo Social" - This was the first experiment with community crowdsourcing of Mahalo pages. Essentially users would recommend links to be added to pages, I would approve or reject the submission, if approved I would visit the page and manually add the link to the appropriate link list. I would also build pages for topics that links were submitted to, but had yet to have a page built for them. This was my job as a "Remote Guide" - Other remote guides worked in the 2008 version of the "Go Team" and were assigned pages to build. There were no tasks, all new pages built was done through the Chat Room.

In 2009 we started Mahalo Answers, I became the community manager and helped introduce new members to the community, I would teach users how to ask and answer questions with quality - My goal was to make the Mahalo Answers community better then the Yahoo Answers community. During this time Mahalo introduced a plethora of additional features such as page management, Mahalo Task, Sister sites etc.. The list goes on, most features on the site today are still under a year old as Mahalo 2.0 was only released in June of 2009.

I’m not here long enough to comment on Mahalo “history”. :-)

I found this Web Archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mahalo.com

You can get a glimpse of how Mahalo looks like in the past.
One puzzling observation:
Mahalo existed in 1998 and started as a porn site ?

Is this true ?

It was not that much better like now The Mahalo is.