image 107 earliest backup of courustcity.net I could find.
This has become a weird section to smash in. Okay so remember I said my DCN Star Wars website became a Natalie Portman themed site since that’s where the money was. Well as we know I didn’t stop liking the wars in the stars. So, I found another website to take over the non-monetary needs. This is when the Coruscant City Forums enter the game.
I guess due to lack of interest from anyone around me I had to go online to find people excited about the upcoming movie. I had after all invested greatly into the toys and was not disappointed by the film itself even with all the silly hoops, I had to jump through to get there with Hien on the day of the release. I latched on to this online community and consumed.
Now initially this story doesn’t star at the forums with that name. It was actually something called like Star Wars Fans .net(Swfans), and was a series of forums where those of us on the internet not jaded by Jar Jar Binks were finding some common footing. And these forums start the story of Coruscantcity.net. This will start in May of 1999 and run throughout, but there are really two main highlighted times with it. From movie release (05/99 through 02/01), then the time I got invested in maintaining the site itself, (09/01 through 05/05). Because of this it does start as a 90s story.
Let’s start with some more background on SWfans. If I ever put it online, I have some footage from April of 1999 with me, Marty and Justin sitting in my room. Justin and I are playing Goldeneye and Marty is on the computer playing a game on a website called The Movie Stock Exchange. During the video you hear us discussing the fictional stock prices of movies, which one could buy in the game up until release, I think it was. The sort of final score if I recall was how much you made from stock purchase of the film to it’s actual gross.
Obviously TPM came with an incredible speculation on the website. This being the new internet era information would be tracked through new articles and fan sites, so somehow I ended up down a rabbit hole one day that lead to a website with a dedicated section on TPM out grossing the then highest grossing film, 1997’s Titanic.
This was hosted or was somehow related to SWFans forums. Then as TPM had a successful but rough release on the internet this became an interesting place to interact with. For one, unlike the internet movie database forums or mainstream television media there wasn’t the angry backlash to things like Jar Jar Binks going on. In fact, it was quiet the opposite, the movie itself was pretty well received. Yup, here we are a couple decades before this kind of trolling becomes a story, but I was learning that critic and unhinged nerds can out yell on the internet. Oddly this never came into focus until the boys yelling in the imdb forums came to clash with the television media, as the television media transitioned to being mainstream but now on the internet. At this time they were aligned and TV media had no idea how irrelevant their B.S. was.
Now I wont like, there was some push back on the other side from going to a box office centric fan site. And some of the posters were insufferable the other way, but what I found over the first month or so was that most of us that just liked star wars enjoyed a place to be nerds about it free of someone that had a need to troll everything he thought might make him weak.
This is where I met Jen. Running under the handle of Jedi Master Princess I got to talking to this young lady on the Star Wars forums. One thing led to another, and I got her on my ICQ list. ICQ for those not in the know was maybe the first popular instant messenger, replaced these days almost primarily with cell phone texting. We were of the same age, in fact we were born in the same week, so we got along. Then another of my hobbies decided it wanted to get involved with Jen. But this story will get covered over and over again. The important part for the 99 section, before the release of Final Fantasy VIII is this:
One late night we got to talking about computer graphics, and I offered to setup my personal transfers on ICQ to send her the entirety of the current Photoshop. Since the days of Tom in the early 90s and four or five disks, this current version was on something like 20 or more 1.44-megabyte archives (disks). I am pretty sure it was even more than 20, because the transfer took all night to get from one modem to the other. To be fair it was still just before high-speed internet so we were sending little packets across, but it was also a lot of them.
So hold onto that nugget. There was a larger group of characters from this site I would start talking to, mainly with that ICQ thing. Jim would affectionally call them the Star Wars nerds and the name kind of took. Sure it sounds mean, but whatever who cares if you like something? Moving on. So somehow early on in the forums, someone had come up with this idea of “Star Wars” day. Which in short was just June 19th 1999. Circled as the day a month later to go watch the movie again if you liked it. Which I lugged myself, by myself to the theater to participate in. Now maybe I should clear up some more of the original Episode one story here. I wrote on about the first showing I went to with Hein, because that was the memorable event.
I did however go and see it again with Mom and Dad that weekend, and with other’s later. But I couldn’t drum up anyone to go to a matinee a month later. But I went and this lead to me getting in the circle with the other California based nerds that would later do the field trip to the “Myth of the magic” in L.A. That of course turned this online fandom with some acquaintances to something I was doing online with no IRL friends. That trip would add to the history of Jen and I, but also made posters like QuigonJ, real name Rick, or Junby, who I cant even remember his online handle into real people.
This reality then made for the first bit of online drama I ever dealt with where I wasn’t one of the administrators. The great SWfans exodus. If memory serves, there was an issue with the way the board was being moderated. Now recollection varies, as to how much this was with dealing with out of line posts and trolls and how much it might have been with the forums uptime, but something broke the straw and most of the regular posters were looking for a new home.
At the time I had a very successful forum running on the celebrity sites and so it seemed a simple idea to have us offer up space to the wayward nerds. Beyond using the site and getting some cross platform users, it meant more ad impressions and possible click throughs. The downside? Turned out although upset with the “ezboard” servers as part of the exodus, everyone was way to familiar with the interface style and so eventually someone had to break down and buy a ultimate bulletin board license to get the closets proximity to what everyone was used too.
It’s funny because I think the ubb license was 120 bucks but who was to buy it was such a major issue. The celebrity sites all ran on proprietary forums and so form our end there was no need to buy another companies software, the extra money earned was only something like 40-60 bucks a month for their traffic. So eventually one of the users, Ruth if I recall, ponied up the money so that they could administrate that specific board on their site.
It was then during this time that all the stuff from 2000 happened with me. Now how it fits in with the Hotrage.com timetable, But I feel this is getting post the drama with Wayne and the users that were now gaining more power within our little entertainment website space. So cc.net as it was now, may have initially been hosted off hotrage.com itself.
During the first year of Coruscantcity.net the drama didn’t die down after the move. But now it was all home grown. I remember their being a feeling that those that moved to cc.net were “refuges” or maybe even “rebels” that split off. And those two different ways of thinking also lead to two different kinds of posters. Some just trolling or immature, which always deal, with the twenty or so moderators that came from the move, not to well. But there was a weird case I do remember and that was a poster named, oddly, Johnathon.
He was so pro-TPM that somehow he made arguments with people would loved the film. Like the kind of stuff people assume nerdy kids do, attacking qualifications to be a fan, but on some level that lacked the tack or understanding of how to deal with people socially. But being a hardened fan, and one of the original people that wanted to move, his drama sparked controversy and got the backing of anyone who felt slighted by the new “communist” rule.
To be honest I remember thinking it all harmless at the time, but there was this sort of evening out period in 2001, where it felt like cc.net got smaller and more close knit. Which was great for me as a fan, but the business end kind of tapered off. Now when Jason and I relaunched things under TAoD.com, we may have kept the ad banners on cc.net, but the income they brough in now was insignificant. But since everyone seemed to rally around me after Jen and I broke up in 2001, I found a lot of comfort hanging out there.
That group really started the comic Con trip cycle that year then too. Comic Con 2000 had been part of a series of get togethers the previous year, but it wasn’t until we returned in 2001 that it started to become everyone’s thing to do in July. Thus why I always managed to keep them a home. And that is why after switching jobs to work with Steve in 2001, I got them hopped over to his hosting service for the websites. It afforded them some “freedom” from the other sites during all that upheaval and put someone in charge of making sure it was always paid for that might not want to jump ship later on.
So really begins the second major time of the website. On a new server I’ll keep pushing a change to PHP so they can run a website along side the bulletin board, and this attempt will follow the site through the next two prequels, until waning forum users eventually leads to just making CC.net a forward to the message boards period.