To be brief (as KKOB has a short attention span)
Having visited Turkey as a holiday destination we thought we would look into the possibility of buying a holiday home there. I searched most of the coast for estate agencies that had sites in English and most were not, and those that had English were generally awful. By chance I found one where I even got a response back. They happened to be in a place called Calis and for that reason (and that reason alone) I arranged to visit Calis to look at property.
My wife couldn't come and I travelled alone. Being an internet anorak I searched the entire world wide web for photos of this Calis place and found around 5. Looking back I'm sure at least one of them wasn't Calis at all.
Anyway, a property was purchased and through that I met Rimms who had just done the same thing and slowly but surely others in the same boat were getting in touch and emails were going back and forward and new people copied in.
Prior to all this I was fairly active on several internet discussion forums (nothing at all to do with Turkey or property) and had always thought that I would like to find a subject for a forum that hadn't been done. I thought of loads of brilliant unique ideas for a forum - only to get home and check it out and find it had already been done many times. Then in a flash of inspiration (that took a while to arrive) I recalled how I failed to find anything on the internet about that insignificant little backwater called Calis.
The initial idea was to cut out the many emails were were sending each other and copying bits of to people we knew but didn't know the person who wrote it etc - just a discussion forum so we could all pool our thoughts and discuss them. Our popularity took off and in no time we had an amazing 25 members! I remember at 75 members we just stopped attracting members and that seemed to be us
CBF was born 10 years ago this year, and I was member number 1 and Terry, who owns and runs the popular Turkeyvilla website was member number 2. Terry helped me set CBF up initially, before she started Turkeyvilla. The funny/strange thing about that was that Terry and I knew each other very well from previous discussion forums - in fact, when we became friends we ran a disability forum together - and neither of us had a Turkey related forum because at that time neither of us had ever been to Turkey!
There's truth in George's comment about the domain and a waiter too - just not much! Calisbeach.com was already registered and that is how I ended up with calis-beach.co.uk - I hated that pesky hyphen. By accident I learned that calisbeach.com was owned by one of the owners of Sultans Restaurant on the prom (now long gone) and I knew the guy very well and offered him a significant sum for it, several times. He rejected all offers out of hand. Then within 6 months Sultans was gone, he was gone, the domain expired and I registered it for around £18
But by then calis-beach.co.uk was well established and I stuck with that as the main website address.
And yes Alan, that is the brief version, I could go on for hours about the life and times of CBF
