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Kamek! I KNEW you would show up!

The King of the Wackos asked in the FB Group Chat if anyone wanted the domain because it was going to expire. I expressed interest and he transferred it over, plus let me download backup information from the old server. I got it squared away on the domain, hosting, and vBulletin for at least the next year, then gave it my best shot to get some sort of old archive restored! The date of the database backup we're working off of was from late December 2009, so we're obviously missing many more years of memories. But what we've got is what was possible, and it's preserved for us as for as long as I have anything to do with it.

This site means something to a lot of us. I hope the cringe doesn't hurt too bad

The cringe is what makes it so beautiful. An era in our lives where we were all finding ourselves - before adulthood, before kids, before becoming the best versions of ourselves.

Thank you so much for taking this on.

It has been my absolute privilege and pleasure

Pretty solid of Jesse to make sure someone had the opportunity to take over before it expired. And yeah, Hyper, VERY solid of you to put in the time, money and effort.

What was the domain being used for in the past, like, ten years anyway?

From what I remember mostly just the barebones text chatbox scripts. My memory of when it was an actual forum (under Jesse or Klarth/fnool, vbulletin or phpbb) is a bit fuzzy but I know that chatbox was still going up until the day I took over.

And yes, HUGE HUGE props to Jesse for reaching out to the community. This site inspired me when I was 13!!! to get into websites and web design, which led to coding, which led to the career I have today, so this is a big full circle thing for me personally to now have the keys here. And if Jesse has any requests going forward I will most certainly honor them.

Unless that request is to shut down the site haha.

Yeah, well said everyone.

This place wasn't perfect, but **** it was fun.
Such memorable things like being made a moderator at 14, I think a fair few of us were like this.

I can look back at old posts and be pretty pleased with how I was back then, organised, motivated and trying to get things done.

Big shout out to Jesse for keeping this place in some form or another and not letting it expire.
and just for making the **** place in the first place.
Too many places have left that happen when they could have passed it on to someone else.

And yeah, same here, I kept checking in every now and then hoping it would go back to being a forum and not a chat box.
I even posted in it saying exactly that.

I have been bemoaning the shift away from Forums on the internet over the years.
F***book, Discord, these things just don't cut it compared to forums.
Things just get lost in the noise all the time.
We can bring back Forums, or at least this one just by being active.
It doesnt have to be as active as it once was, it just has to be...active enough.

I think there was a brief period in 2018ish? when Jesse had a phpbb board up but it didn't get much use. Also there is a discord that is populated by a mixture of WoN people and pokemon chat people that has apparently been going since 2016.

My feelings are very complicated re: the time when I was running the show but I am happy to see it back. I have a lot of nostalgia for Old Internet type stuff. I've enjoyed being on bluesky the past couple years. While it was still a closed beta it really felt like being back in the forums era again. Recognisable faces, shared investment in the specific feature set of the 'place' where we're all hanging out and getting to know each other. Brings me back to when we were all running around on here doing IP address checks on each other trying to suss out who had alt accounts.

Said it a bunch of times already while we've been talking about stuff but thank you for stepping up Hyper. This is special.

I absolutely have to echo the lamentation of internet communities moving to Discord. Just doing the same exact thing we used to do on web forums except now a big ****ty tech company owns it instead of the users, and they're content to gradually make it worse in an effort to turn you into a product. It may be a little silly to bring back something like this, but in a time where there are five whole websites left, keeping the lights on here is well worth the effort.

Also just, like, my old bros. Love you dudes.

Great insight and not one that had really occurred to me before. Discords all seem to develop their own personalities from what I've seen, so they feel very independent, but it's true that one decision at Discord HQ would affect all of them equally.

I discovered WoN / the www boards at 8 years old. Man you were such an important part of my childhood. You even taught me how to hyperlink using HTML.



I tried so hard to win the contest to be the 1 millionth visit lol

The picture you had on the about the website section of WoN for some reason reminded me of Abe Lincoln so I always associate you with him

I would have been thirteen when I first joined, and definitely an immature thirteen. I had spent years by that point frequenting chatrooms for Nintendo franchises, the thing I was MOST obsessed with as a preteen, but the one that was my current home at the time crashed and went down for basically that whole summer. With absolutely no other social connections to rely on, I just pulled up a Yahoo! search and typed in exactly what I was looking for, a "Video Game Chat." If Jesse hadn't worked so hard making sure VGC was always at the top of search results, I might've never drifted in here.

It's so funny to me now to hear Jesse talk about how he had to make this a good place for us to be kids, knowing NOW he's absolutely right, because at the time it seemed like everyone besides me was so grown up. I always felt like I was surrounded by extremely mature, adult people everyplace I went on the internet back then.