Memories of the Magic Knight Rayearth Forums Options

[Dr. Casey]

The Magic Knight Rayearth forum's 7th birthday is coming up this next July, and despite these being the laziest and most laidback forums ever, I'm sure quite a bit has happened during these past seven years and 50,000+ posts (We're at 49,018 as of the time this is posted, but who knows how many posts were lost from before May 2005. Stupid ezBoard, didn't think message board owners needed the ability to back up their own forums...) So what are some of your most important memories related to these forums, whether those come from chat rooms involving the members or posts on the boards? They don't have to be happy memories necessarily (Though I doubt a place as peaceful as this has anything too dramatic), just special somehow. Maybe I should have made this thread before the board was completely abandoned except for me, Hikaru, and perhaps Emiko, but...

- I remember doing an ezBoard search for message boards related to Magic Knight Rayearth shortly before my 16th birthday (August 1st 2003), and these forums weren't brought up. I wonder if the boards were still too young and small to show up in the Search Results? I dunno. Kind of disappointing though, I'd have liked to discover these forums in their infancy, when they were just a few weeks old. Hell, I could have signed up before yuzuki, Batou, Yume, and all those other old-timers. Alas.

- Although I ended up being a total newbie, not signing up until May 2004, my actual debut to this place is special to me. I first came to these boards the night of May 30th, 2004 (Apparently the Search function worked that time) in the midst of a heavy depression over things that seemed very important at the time. At that point I'd been completely miserable for somewhere around two weeks, but hanging around this small, cozy little message board I'd stumbled across took my mind off those troubles. I could forget about everything that was bothering me and just browse through the Introductions forum seeing Hikaru bury all the newbies in chocolate, read some thoughts from Batou and Yuzuki regarding the Magic Knights, or watch that animated image of Umi trying to smash Mokona. I spent the next few days stuck on the forums, and by the next time I thought about those old problems that had me so bothered just a couple of days before, I'd come to discover that I no longer cared about them at all. Almost seemed like magic, just how quick and easy the healing was. I still use the experience as a reference point to this day. Whenever something's bothering me I might think, "I just need to get away from the problem for a bit and then I'll be able to move on, just like that time I first came to the Magic Knight Rayearth boards."

- The aftermath of the old forum's destruction during May and June 2005. It's hard to forget the heavy atmosphere that loomed over the forums during that time (Hikaru's avatar definitely contributing to the somber mood). And even though I do wish that whole stupid thing had never happened, I have to admit that everyone showing how much they cared about this place with their reactions to that whole debacle was a pretty nice consolation prize.

- I'll always remember the moment I finished the Magic Knight Rayearth season two episode reviews. Damn that was a lot of work. And speaking of that avatar Hikaru used for a bit, it was cool recognizing it during one of the season two episodes.

Anyway, that's about all that comes to mind for me; I've never been much of a regular, so I don't have a whole lot worth noting. So what about the rest of you?

[Shiidou Hikaru]

I took me a while to think of what to say. It's truly rare to see such a lovely comment as you wrote above Casey-san, I really mean that.

I still use the experience as a reference point to this day. Whenever something's bothering me I might think, "I just need to get away from the problem for a bit and then I'll be able to move on, just like that time I first came to the Magic Knight Rayearth boards."

I don't think that you were referring to me personally, but I'm still touched that the forum here had such a positive influence when you were going through a dark time in the past and still remains a positive influence today. *hugs* The forum did something very real for you and words can't really describe the wonderful feeling I have of being a part of that.

As I recall, I was going through a bit of a dark time myself when I first started the forum on Ezboard back in 2003. It wasn't so much of a depression issue as it was a self esteem issue and I did write about that when I first started writing my journal thread. Since then I've been through a few ups and downs and right now things seem to be going along pretty level so maybe that's why I haven't been writing my thoughts and feelings out over the last couple years. In many ways Casey-san, we both arrived here for the same reason - looking for a place to talk about Magic Knight Rayearth. I'd searched and searched for some time to find others to discuss MKR with, but even at that time MKR had been out for 10 years already so interest had waned a lot. So the answer for me was to make my own forum, Yaaayy! At first I was the only one here because I don't really like to go around to other forums and spam my board. So at the time it was a really good place to be alone with my thoughts, I felt safe doing that here. Eventually more people came through the Ezboard network system (Yuzuki-chan, Yume-chan, Batou-san, Docs-san & more) and some were friends that I knew elsewhere (Shiro-chan, Yuki-chan, & others) and invited them here. Soon the forum became very busy and sections were added for roleplaying, even for other series besides MKR.

As many bad feelings I had and still do for Ezboard (now Yuku) their ability to network forums really was a great way to cross pollinate forums of all various different interests. Nowadays we have facebook and twitter and a whole lot of others, but Ezboard was one of the first. Of course the Ezboard disaster of 2005 was a painful experience for a great number of people. Ours was only one of thousands of boards that experienced similar losses of data. I don't really know the exact number, but I had estimated that we lost 18,000 posts back then. It truly was a sad experience and although I didn't think it destroyed the forum, it did seem like a violation of sorts. And like you said Casey-san, it brought a lot of us much closer together. After we moved here, I had regretting not doing it sooner because I already had plans in the works to do so.

After the move, things went very well for a while until a new threat arrived - the spambotters. Ezboard had some of these, but they were nothing like the automated search engine optimizers that started to dump filth of every sort here in our community. Dealing with that was new adventure for me as I tried to interpret the logic these programs used to find our forum and make spam accounts. They harvest the links from search engines like google and run automated scripts to fill in account registration forms and make posts. So I used countermeasures like disabling crawler bots, changing board url's, and devising creative names for the forum sections. Batou-san was a big help with that last part. Using the board ban filtering also was required, but it was still a constant battle against the bots.

Probably my most well remembered memories of the board are

- the first, early days of the forum and writing my journal
- chocolatizing a newbie that was diabetic (that was very embarassing ;;),
- the dreaded Ezboard meltdown
- the fast and furious Mokona's Playground posting where several of us couldn't keep up with each other
- the MKR roleplaying, even though I was Umi most of the time ;;
- Casey-san's review section of all of the MKR episodes, which I see as quite valuable to have
- doing reviews of a number of other series (although a ton of these were lost by Ezboard v_v)
- participating in the journals that other members had started, that brought a lot of use closer together
- and just now reading about how the board helped a friend though a difficult time

Maybe you didn't have a high post count Casey-san, but for what you have said over the years, there is much that is worth noting. *hugs* Thank you for still being so loyal for this long.