Seeing as I still repeatedly get asked what the site is about or why we have such a random range
of topics or what the motto "Just cruisin'" is supposed to mean, a brief overview of how this place came to be:
Once upon a time in a galaxy far away... there was a guy, let's call him XIII, who liked dabbling with html
and making web designs. Somewhere in the year 2001 he got bored with plain html and after reading some stuff about PHP
decided that this would be fun to play with, so he went and created an account at the freebie site f2s.com. A basic
looking frame was created and the coding began. But alas, you get what you pay for and after 2 weeks the frustration of
a slow loading site which was down half the time pushed said person to sign up for a paid host. A thousand new options
were now within reach and all was good. A new layout quickly went online and the basic site was there, still with the
only purpose: fiddling around with PHP.
A little while later I came in touch with Edgar of Avalanche Online through the webhost's (at the time) forum
and after mailing back and forth about technical issues I decided to join the forum as per his request. I joined, posted a
bit here and there and raised a few questions and gave a few suggestions regarding how the site was managed and before
I knew it I was moderator, then supermoderator and eventually co-admin. Go figure.
Meanwhile my own site was still my own little expirement, with Corvo joining in as we tried out new stuff noone knew
about or looked at. Until, after checking out a lot of scripts in different other categories, I decided to install a PHP
based forum to see how it worked and maybe have a laugh with some friends. The forum (phpBB 1.4) was installed, a mail sent out to
a handful of personal friends and the few of us started posting (in Dutch).
Here's where things got off track (and they really haven't been back ON track since ;) because through the wonders of linkage
some people of the aforementioned AO signed up and started posting as well, some in Dutch, some in English.
For whatever reason they liked the laidback nonsense the few of us had made a handful threads about (mostly common interests
and daily happenings), and they told others to check it out.
So by the end of 2001 phpBB2.0 was released and I decided to start the forum anew from scratch, based on this new version.
People signed up again, more and more, and subforums got added as time went by based on the amount of posts for a specific topic.
As such the thing sort of took on a life of its own none of us had anticipated. Best example of this is when Corvo got his
XBox modded and made a thread about it going all whee. Some else asked a question about it, he answered it, and so a
few threads were started about the whole DIY modding. Pretty soon, through the wonders of Google, more people found their
way to the forums and we had to give it a seperate subforum because we were getting flooded by people looking for help
and information. At the height of the whole modding hype over 30000 people a month found their way here looking for just that info.
We added a chatroom in 2002 to play around with IRC and have a common meeting ground for the people of AO, FFMO and X111, as
well as a gallery where people could upload their photos and drawings and the site started looking more and more like a
proper site and less like a coding experiment.
People posted about anime; we added an anime subforum with Kaitou and Darknight ZO kicking off the review section which
has since then grown into one of the biggest content sections of the site. So basically, the only answer we can give you to the
question what the site is about is; anything you want it to.
Ah yeah, the motto... I think it was somewhere in 2003 during one of the (totally random) moments in our site's history
where noone seemed to post Corvo and I were discussing the situation and wondering what we could do about it. Basically our
conclusion was to just go about our business and post as usual (people were still reading it by the thousands after all) when
Corvo jokingly suggested we should use "Just cruisin'" as motto. So basically it simply means we're all here to kick back and relax and
post about what's going on and about what interests us.
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