by Neo »
09 Jan 2006, 20:07
I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that everyone who's posting on the site currently is a part of the 5th generation of posters we've had on the-spot.net.
After every major lull in the site, we lose a couple members, and gain a couple new members. This brings about a new change in information, a way threads are made, and a new perspective on how topics are discussed.
Some of you have been around since the every first generation. But there are not many of you who fit that. UPS, myself, possibly comter...we were all members of tsnI before we knew what My Spot was, or that it's better to host our own forums on a webhost than use lycos to do it.
Some of y'all have been around since the second generation when I started dating a girl, and never came back to the site during the 3 months that we were together. The site died, and I had to create tsnII. That was the first official upgrade and declaration of a new generation of posters...and it brought in a new kind of website, where we started to learn how to create a My Spot page and pull information from the forums. Most of it was manually done, and placed in Java Scripts, but it was a major step forward from static html. Some of those people are KD, JAD and a couple others that don't come around all that often.
The third generation was with the release of tsnIII, when we had the very first My Spot page written in PHP. For that site, I took 2 weeks to learn everything I needed to know about PHP, and put together the site in a month, to release on Jan 1 2004. It was the first "big deal" for a new site release, and brought about an aire of professionalism to the spot. It became an valid web community with dynamic content throughout, and several custom scripts that I created to do what I wanted with the forums. People around from this era include (but aren't limited to, because there are several...Lady Love, Divine David, azure_hopes_immortal, frostebitemartini, and tons of others from Nac. It wasn't until tsnIII that the site exploded as a playground for everyone from NHS.
Then in the end of January, there was the Great Crash of 2004 when the webhost (endore.com) went bankrupt and suddenly disappeared from the internet, taking with it thousands of websites and the data stored on them. Many people did not have backups, including us, of the data, and had to start from scratch. The online world was up in arms for several months, as social hackers tracked down the guy that ran the company and talked with his mother to find out what the deal was.
After that, everything went ok, when we got back online for a couple months, and a lull ensued with the end of the semester coming upon the site. After the lan party that summer though, people came back and in greater numbers. The Almighty One (TAO) was part of this boom, as was baka sushi, and others....but now they've kind of disappeared. BrazilsKiss stepped into the scene too during tsnIII, when we found each other on the internet randomly.
Then in June 2004 I began work on tsnIV, but that flopped because the design that I had in mind was made to be simple for changing, but the website that it turned into looked like crap. So I skipped tsnIV and went straight to V, with a new inspiration, and new twist on the graphics. I wanted a more realistic, but yet more abstract/clay-like logo, and a 3D design for the site. This new design did it. But to keep people coming, I added in a TON of new features. The release of tsnV brought in several users to come more often like Kaze and RageCage. This was the 4th generation.
And now, after the site went down for about a month, and weeded out all the people that were barely coming as it was, it's back up (and about to go back to the other server when I have officially made the right coding), and after the LAN party....there are several new people joining, and it's bringing about a shift in veterins vs newbies. It's manifesting itself in a new generation of posters, with more social networking to do, and more connections to make. People like WTM, and Dewey...Khaozarcher and others are bringing in new ideas and perspectives on old topics. It's just what is needed to spark up discussion once again. After all...when you run a forum for 3 years, you tend to cover everything under the sun, and then cover everything that's new in real-time.
If I left your name out (Because I know I did) then feel free to tell everyone at what point you joined the site...it'll give everyone a sense of who's been around for a while, and who to ask questions to.
So welcome to tsnV....Welcome to the next evolution.
"Because I choose to."
[[Neo]]