Fifteen years

[Cferra]

Hail!

I was talking to Gabi on Skype and we just hit a realization that this site, TPM, is going to be fifteen years old this year. That's about as old as Zak and shazza were when they first joined. Correct me if I am wrong. =) Anyway, I thought I'd make a thread celebrating the fifteen years of the site. We can discuss good memories. Weird fights. I remember I had my own umm...issues. Thankfully I rectified that and respond to things now with age, wisdom and enough snark to make Lewis Black go "DAMN, SON!"

So, it's been an interesting fifteen years. I miss a lot of things since a lot of us have been here since the very, very beginning. I miss Soo, Ade, Suzie and yeah even Damian. They and several others were good people. Now we've all moved on. Gav and I are entrenched in the weird and just plain out there world of video producing or podcasting in Gav's case. We all moved on, sure. But ya know we have a connection to this place. I'd hate to be sentimental but...yeah that's going to happen.

Let's raise a glass. I have provided everyone with booze from Little Pikachu's storage. She never could hide the combination from me. =) To TPM! I never thought we'd make it this far. SALUT!

*sips*

Just to be sure. The actual anniversary's in March, right? So, any memories of the last fifteen years you want to share? I remember this bunch being the first community online I talked to regularly. Was fun. We all branched off and yet we always find ourselves back here. Why? Nostalgia? Or are we a close group? Who knows, eh? Who...KNOWS!

[Austrian ViceMaster Alex]

Has it been 15 years already? Time sure is flying. In a way it seems like ... well, not yesterday but last year at least. Other things seem to have happend so long ago that I barely remember them.

Well, all the best to you all. Let's see if TPM will still be around in another 15 years from now.

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

I joined when I was 16, September 2001. The original reason, this may come out of blue. I had a short e-mail exchange with this English girl who spotted me in a Final Fantasy-themed guestbook on another webpage. I guess I could call her my first Internet friend. However, shocked by September 11th, I sent her a strange E-mail and she didn't reply me anymore. So I looked for something else to do with the internet. Because I liked Pokemon and had used the main site for info, I decided to make an account on TPM although I didn't have a clue of what I was doing.

TPM was enough for me to spend, at best, about 6 hours a day in my old high school's computer class back in 2001-2004. That's right, my substitute family in Haapavesi didn't have a stable internet access so I came to school sometimes at 7 AM when the cleaning ladies opened the doors. The headmaster even gave me a permission to stay in the classroom after the classes ended at 4 PM. My English wasn't as fluent as it should have been, and there were many posts, so reading and posting took a lot of time. I thought about the site a lot, and I dreamed of obtaining a high postcount, and becoming an important member, eventhough I was just a lurker.

I remember lots of things. The endless religion discussions, titled something like 'Hey, if their god was fake, why can't ours be?', started by a person named Kala. A hilarious fake Pokemon cheat thread more than 10 pages long. The EZBoard phase. Babel Fish translations about the anime episodes next up in Japan. Soon, I produced the forum with my own translations. I also remember names like Vundi, Hanada Tattsu (every second post in Pokemon anime), vidgamer, The Rusted One, Silver Ledian, AKA Pokemon Fan.

I have taken a total of 4 longer breaks from the forums. One was after Sailor Moon anime finally landed in Finland and I became a Sailor Moon fanboy, autumn 2002. Returned in January 2003. Then, in 2004, I was still a lurker with like 600 posts. Was sent to a hospital called Visala from the army. I had my activities cut to minimum for one year, and was able to return greater than ever before in early 2006. I started posting in PGC, topics I had never understood before. Posting became faster and faster, especially because my personality had developed more open and I also revealed a lot of things I had hidden before.

Later in 2006 I had to take another break because of sleeping problems. 2007, 2008 and the first half of 2009 were quite stable in the contrary. Those were the days I brought here every remaining aspect of my personality. I posted the story of my life and finally joined ASB. I learned I had a huge impact on the forum at least when I had to return to the mental hospital for a longer period September 2009. Talking about shazza's super hot disucussion he started almost immediately about my absence. Spring 2010, I came back. I never posted 'Hey! I'm back!' thread because I thought it would be best not to promise anything.

But I'm quite sure I'll stay here on TPM till the end. The end of TPM is like the end of the world in a certain sense. Already in 2009, people posted about the possibility to shut down TPM, but it's still kicking after 5 years.

[Lady Vulpix]

Sometimes it feels like it all happened last year, sometimes it feels like it was a different life entirely. It's hard to believe that some people have been members for most of their lives. Not my case, but TPM has also played a significant role in my life.

I joined TPM just to ask Pokemon-related questions, since I was playing Pokemon Gold at the time. Then I started reading other people's topics and playing RPGs and things began to get interesting, I remember some nice ones by Dragon Clan, and some conversations with Sacherry, who was unfairly banned by Hydro for personal reasons.

Then all the clubs and Pokemon adoption threads started popping up, and among the clubs I found one with a really enticing name: the Dragon's Guild. The Guild was then being runn by Scott McHenry a.k.a. Indraugnir, and it was mostly dedicated to sharing words of wisdom, which was a passtime of mine at that time. That, and I was then in a writing workshop called "Los Dragones", so I took that as a sign and if I was ever right about a sign it was that time. Then everything evolved from there and before I knew it I was running writing contests and working on what later became AC/CC. (I was made a Dragon Tamers worker a day late due to my not having AIM at the time of its creation, but then I installed AIM immediately).

Then there was a big and crazy time of writing sprees - which I really needed for personal reasons - and lots of interactions which took all of 2001 and most of 2002. That was the time when I met Connor, Alex, Nolan, Amy, Steve, PlatinumHawke and most of the old crew. I also engaged in some writing for the Fanfic Forum, even an ambitious 4-author project with the NMFP group. Then the forums fell and were replaced by an EZBoard... I don't think we ever completely recovered from that, but we survived... And then there were more good times... the silver age, I could say, from late 2002 to mid-2005, when Amy and I were PCG mods, with Ade and Soo breathing new life into AC/CC, Karin, Tara and others writing lovely fics, and Expedia at its peak despite the Expedia workers' curse (to which only I was immune). Then TPM was gone again. We moved to Tsuyoi's Lair for a while and then were glad of TPM's return, but a lot of members didn't make it back.

The subsequent years were slow and marked by old members popping up for a while and then vanishing again. Nostalgia was already a constant on TPM, but there have also been some interesting new developments, like Jeff taking over the almost forgotten Unown Awards and running them year after year since then, and the Fanfic Forum E-Zine.

Then TPM hit a new low in 2008-2009, when Chris, who had been running it, disappeared and left registration closed. Kevin was also missing and Suzie was locked out of her Admin CP, so TPM had effectively no admins and no way to get any new members. Luckily, before the end of 2009 I was finally able to contact Kevin (and win the "She found Kevin!" award). Kevin showed up briefly to save the day - which he has been doing many times since then - and so Suzie's admin powers were restored, registrations were open again and I became an admin!

The rest is more or less recent history, although it's already been over 5 years. Some nice things happened, like the Website reboot, and some not so nice like the Fanfic hack, which on the bright side showed us how well we can work together: within less than a day the forum was fixed, all the topics were disentangled and Smiley Town gained over a million views. And so we've kept going and we're still going. I had to work extremely hard on my thesis, so although I never left, I was unable to give TPM the attention it deserved, but now that I finally got my PhD, I can dedicate more of my time to the forums again. So, if others are interested, we can share ideas, post new threads and bring some old ones back to life, and so TPM will keep going... hopefully for many years to come.

[Magmar]

I joined TPM in the 90s! Back when we didn't have a forum, just a chat, instant messenger, and a bunch of team rating stuff. I even wrote crappy essays for the website, which may have seemed brilliant at the time to other 12 year-old readers, but probably very juvenile to older readers. I still remember the feeling of being published on the site. It got me to write so much more. I was the lead writer for the Red and Blue walkthrough. Fast forward to the day of the announcement of the forum, and I signed up straightaway.

I was a very early moderator in the forum, too. I thought I had so much responsibility, being 13 and being a moderator. It felt like having a job. I took it super seriously. I ended up losing my moderator designation because I was closing up spam in subforums that were not in my designation. Folks were very, very territorial about that. I thought I was just doing the forum the best service I could. Apparently, those rules were not meant to be broken. I actually got super upset when I lost my moderator designation.

Over the years I've put a lot into the forum. I invested in the server for quite some time, although there were constantly issues with that, and in the end I found out that we just purchased another one. I was throwing dollars at a server that wasn't being used, so I canceled it. In retrospect, I probably should've taken that server and built my own website with it, but I just don't know enough about coding to manage that level of web management.

Speaking of management, when I became a moderator in this forum, I wanted to learn more about management, so I started reading about the subject. The more I learned about management, the more I wanted to be a good leader.

Today, I have a BS in management and an MBA in management, too! I work in nonprofit management, lead on several health care committees, and am on the board of directors of another nonprofit. I regularly do job coaching, resume help, cover letters, mock interviews, and application assistance. I'm a go-to person when it comes to quality management and people management. It all started with managing the general discussion sub-forum on this website.

Regardless of that, I've met a lot of you now and you've all been incredibly friendly. I'd hang out with any of you again and there are a number of others I would love to hang out with at some point. Maybe if I'm ever not poor

[Blademaster]

I don't know why I keep coming back here. Lord knows I'm not exactly welcome. I guess it's just because this is the oldest of my Internet hangouts that hasn't died yet (RIP all those MSN groups that went extinct ten years ago.).

[Lady Vulpix]

Wow, Magmar, I had no idea TPM had left such an important mark in your life! And I guess you're one of the people who have spent most of their lives here.

Blade, by "no exactly welcome" do you mean "can't help getting into fights"? Because no one has banned you nor told you to leave, you know.

[Dark-San]

15 years is a long time ^^. Cheers TPM!