The History of YACK

YACK, as an online entity began on September 8, 1999 on YAHOO. It was a YAHOO Group, called simply, "Nantucket" for over five years. It became known as YACK after Grant Sanders, the moderator started a local TV talk show by that name in 2004. The TV show lasted only a few months, but YACK grew in popularity as a result of the TV exposure. YACK left YAHOO in 2005 and became its own site on the web by switching to a web forum format. The name of the site and the url, "yackon.com" was actually coined by YACK user, and then Selectman, Matt Fee. The site grew in popularity even more from 2005 through 2008 when Grant wrote a humor column in the local newspaper, the Nantucket Independent on the subject of Nantucket and the discussions that took place on YACKon.com. Today, YACK has a new look and new functionality thanks to a bunch of nasty Russian hackers who brought the system to its knees in the Spring of 2010 and necessitated the creation of a whole new forum system. YACK receives over 20,000 page views daily and has hundreds of active users.