Today marks the 10th anniversary of our forum. Ten years ago I sat down and made a decision that would affect my life far more than I thought it would. I'm gonna tell y'all a
story, but this post will be a little tl;dr so first here is a gift:
Foster's Bible (pdf download)
Courtesy of Cassini, this is the show's original production bible, as written by Craig McCracken! Now to begin:
So I liked this new cartoon called
Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends I had caught on CN several times. I like to discuss shows and movies I have seen recently online - I usually go to IMDB, but there wasn't much discussion going on for Foster's there at the time - so I was mostly reading the TV.com boards. I was (well, still am, but frankly don't care anymore) an editor for several shows on TV.com so I was over there anyways.
For those of you who never spent time on the TV.com forums a decade ago...Omg. Omg it was pretty bad. There WERE intelligent people there with intelligent conversation, but you really had to hunt for it. Everyone else was a horrible person, it seemed. Ranting and bawling over every little thing. The Foster's board was festering with people like that.
But there were a few decent people in there, and they were saying "Wouldn't it be nice if there was a GOOD place where we could talk about this show?"
There was someone on there who had been taking screengrabs from a couple episodes and uploading them somewhere, and geez Louise people lost their g*****n s**t. They were HORRIBLE to this nice person who had gone through all that trouble and kept screaming all these demands, more screencaps, better screencaps, RIGHT THIS MINUTE etc. (Seriously, I have belonged to a lot of fandoms, but these Foster's "fans" have been some of the worst people I have come across.) So this persom was like I'M DONE and deleted all their screencaps and disappeared. I don't blame them.
Well I happened to have all the necessary equipment to record off of the TV and make screencaps, so I started doing that. I think basically I just tried to ignore the screaming people, lol. And the intelligent people were still looking for a good discussion board, and I knew I could do that too...It was Pitbulllady who convinced me, she promised she would be my co-admin if I did it.
So I launched the Proboards forum (btw that is still there, the link is on this forum's main menu called Ye Olde Forum). There are details I remember well about this forum's history, such as what I've already told you, and other suff that blurs together; I don't really remember choosing the rest of the forum staff (sorry guys, I just don't). I remember this was before I had a laptop and I would have to use the hotel's computer to police the forum while we were at Comic-Con. That was annoying. I had lost my job at some point while running the forum and my brother, like seriously encouraged me to devote all my time to the forum and stay home for a while. That turned into a few years. I met a lot of the people who worked on the show because of this forum, and my website, and my screengrab library.
We got so popular that I invested in a vBulletin license and moved the forum to my own website. We had a chatroom for a while, but then I found out that wasn't allowed on our host and I had to take it down. Oh, the chatroom.
Such drama. We've had our share of certain individuals who plagued our existance, on both forums and in the chatroom. There were a few, but notably, we had Crazy Guy, who had literally copy-pasted large portions of my website and claimed it was his. He would also hotlink to my screengrabs (I had to learn how to disable hotlinking) and claim they were his even though they were CLEARLY located on MY website. I remember Ruki would pick on him...here wait I think I have a screenshot:
However, this same guy really did scare me. He would threaten me all the time, telling me he was a hacker, and kept telling me he was going to hack my website. I didn't know anything about hackers, and I was pretty scared. I remember I actually got pretty sick at one point, I lost more than ten pounds one week and had to lie in bed all the time. That's how stressed I was. Then we had the guy who kept pitching crazy episode synopses, not just to us but to CN, I think he's still out there, probably obsessed with another show. Then of course there was (is?) the autistic guy who can't keep reality and fantasy seperate (for real) and has been harassing us off and on for more than five years now, after he was banned for posting porn. There's been a bunch of weird characters, maybe the rest of the staff would like to talk about them.
Okay this post has gone on long enough. Maybe I'll post more later. Happy Anniversary everyone!
