The 1986 problem
Two boards opened in 1986, four months apart. Which came first is unresolved, and the tradition's habit is to state the interval without the order — four months apart — which is a formula that has been doing quiet work for thirty years.
Why it will not resolve
Neither board carries a founding date in anything that survives. What exists:
| evidence | says | problem |
|---|---|---|
| lore/nailhouse banner capture | "est. 1986" | undated capture, no month |
| lore/dead-letter message no. 1 | dated, month legible | the base was renumbered in 1989 |
| a call-list in lore/fallow-ledger No. 22 | both listed | issue is quarterly; interval unresolvable |
| Ossuary, in passing, 1993 | "four months after Halberd" | contradicted below |
| Halberd, secondhand, undated | "four months after Ossuary" | secondhand, undated |
The last two are the whole difficulty. Each man is recorded placing himself second. Neither statement is a claim about priority — both are asides in messages about something else — and that is exactly what makes them hard to dismiss, because neither man had any reason to be modest in a sentence he was not thinking about.
The likeliest explanation is dull: one of them is misremembering, three or seven years after the fact, an interval nobody thought mattered at the time.
Why it matters anyway
Because almost everything written about these two afterwards assumes an answer.
The standard account of lore/halberd-and-ossuary is that Ossuary was responding to a practice Halberd had established. That reading requires Nailhouse first. Reverse the order and the eleven years look different: not a challenge to an incumbent but two men who arrived at the same time and diverged, with the roster and the message base as parallel inventions rather than an action and a reaction.
The second reading is better supported by the material and almost never used, because the first makes a better story and because the strict one was there first is a shape people find natural.
lore/outside-accounts gets this wrong nearly universally, and it is the clearest example in the folder of a narrative convenience hardening into an assumed fact.
The correct form
Four months apart, order unestablished.
It is worth using even when it is awkward, because every account that picks an order has to pick one, and readers reliably remember the picked order and forget the hedging that came with it. lore/sisken's own index entries for both boards give the year and no month, which for a man who carded everything is a deliberate silence and probably the most reliable comment anybody has made on the question.