A RPGWW History
This article is supplemented by A RPGWW History: Miscellany. Be sure to check out the other page for additional information.
Contents
RPG World
The history of the RPGWW community starts before the creation of RPGWW, with the comic RPG World by Ian Jones-Quartey (art blog). RPG World is a webcomic which spoofs the cliches of RPGs--games such as Final Fantasy, for instance.
Now, back in the day, RPG World had an online forum, like many webcomics! Here fans of RPG World congregated to talk about the comic in specific, and also nothing in particular. Occasionally, a poster would come to the forum who would not be a fan of the comic--someone who came for the social aspect, perhaps alerted to the community by another poster--but these were few. By and large, posters were also fans and once-fans of console RPGs.
UBB: the early board
The early board was a single-forum UBB (Universal Bulletin Board). All threads were displayed together (like a single subforum of our RPGWW, or today's RPG World forum), and in each thread, 75 posts were displayed per page. The UBB was hosted on Keenspot, as was RPG World at the time.
No doubt influenced by these limitations, there was a certain uniformity to forum threads. Very few threads were 'serious' or uniformly serious. The larger portion of posters had a persona under which they posted--a sort of roleplaying in and of itself. Some threads would have mixed serious and persona responses, which led to some misunderstandings.
Early personas established during this period include Ash Fanrico, Daniel, Folx/EmpressFolx, Jinx, KingOfDoma, Neko, Nekogami, Phil/EmpressPhil, Rydia-chan/Empress Rydia, Stephan, Vulture, and Zero the Barkeep (not to be confused with Capntastic, "Brodzky Zero"). It was during this time that the country of Doma was established. Boozeland was created during this time, as well, but as with many others, it was selected to not to be carried over into RP canon later.
RPGWW? RPGWW!
It became popular to create or modify game sprites to represent one's forum persona, to the point that a handful or more posters had done so. This, perhaps, helped lend the idea to poster Chrono_Catfish to make a sprite comic based on the forum shenanigans.
A thread posed the question: what should this comic be called? The answer came back: RPG World World.
RPing
Most RPGW/W forumers were, by the time C_C's comic was getting into the swing of things, already posting under a created persona. Epic spam threads were occurrences many looked forward to; in such, over the course of a very short amount of time forumers would post rapid-fire responses in a single thread, often with amusing results. Some of these threads took the course of plot, spawning new characters--Staniel, for instance, or TDTLTTOBNL.
Early attempts at RPs were similar to this, but purposefully instigated instead of happy accidents. They largely did not take off.
The first "serious RP" and perhaps first RP to finish would be The Hit, started by Ash Fanrico. While bearing several typical features of a GM's and RPers' first venture into RPing, by and large those who participated in it enjoyed it greatly. The events from the RP are pseudo-canon. The Hit started and ended on the UBB forum.
The second RP to finish was Rise of the Guild (sequel: In Pursuit of the Darkness). This RP was started and GMed by Archmage, using the Philsys thingie which had been somewhat recently developed by forumer Phil-dog. Rise of the Guild started and ended on the UBB forum.
After the successful completion of Archmage's first RP and especially his second--and his loud encouragement--more posters began to try their hands at GMing and RPing.
Discontent
With the RPGWW comic and RPing beginning to take off, there was suddenly a lot more to the community to attract posters who weren't interested in RPG World. More people began to come to the forum, which wasn't completely to the liking of everyone there at the time.
Larger than before, the RPG World forum now had very distinct social groups. There were those who spammed and those did not, those who RPed and those who didn't, those who talked about the comic and those who did not even so much as read it. There were artists, who tended to be popular and well-known, if also sometimes disliked and envied for their popularity based on their "innate" skill. There were also the other well-known forumers--those who posted frequently, those who had "loud" personas, or those who contributed in some significant way to the community (such as Chrono_Catfish).
People who were unhappy stated so. Plenty of suggestions were made as to who should leave and who should stay. It was pointed out more than once that this was the RPG World forum, especially as talk of the comic became less and less common.
The forum itself was experiencing technical problems more and more frequently. It had always--at least from 2001 onward--suffered the problem of having the occasional thread eaten, but now it was happening more and more frequently. The board went down for several days, taking several threads and user accounts with it.
This was a keenspace-wide problem, however, and the keen powers that be were keen on a solution. The solution, then, that the good folks of keen appeared to settle upon was to move away from the UBB-based forums and over to phpBB.
Keen phpBB are...GO!
One day, the RPG World comic board link led to a VERY different forum. Instead of the familiar whites and pale greys of the UBB, the board was dark. Lord only knows why keenspace decided to change the color scheme so drastically--people complained, of course, because it was different--but more importantly, for a time, the board worked a little better.
Then someone changed the phpBB color scheme. And everything went to hell.
The pages loaded slowly at the best of times, on a fast connection, leaving dial-up-dependent forumers "SoL." Roughly half the time, however, the pages refused to answer for even the best of connections.
Thus...
Suicidal Sprite, to the rescue
Poster Suicidal Sprite went to ezboard.com to open a new board--one we could actually post at. The ezB RPGWW was established on 22 April 2002.
The original idea was that we would, at the least, have a temporary place to post until keenspace got it's rear in gear. Perhaps if we liked the forum enough, we'd just stay there. There was a little concern that keenspace wouldn't provide usable boards, as the UBB boards had some pretty notable issues to begin with.
There was a little discontent with the move due to the overt distancing from RPG World. By this time, however, it was noticeable and noted that a growing number of the community didn't read the comic; a few were unaware of its existence, which came out in the ensuing discussion. While IanJ was becoming aware of the problems with the forums and working on moving his board to an independent phpBB system, RPGWWers decided that the benefits of the ezB forum won out over staying as the "RPG World comic forum."
Communication with Ian during this time was lacking. Ian posted in the ezB forum about this, mentioning that he would have appreciated being alerted to the problems with the forums sooner. He offered to set us up in the phpBB he was setting up, which would have a large number of the most important benefits offered by ezB: most notably, divided subforums and moderators. Today, he keeps a link to the RP forum from the RPG World comic page. The comic forum is strictly on-topic, with a stickied post which links to a separate off-topic board.
RPG World upgraded to keenspot roughly the same time that RPGWW moved to the ezB. This helped bring an influx of new posters to Ian's comic forums, which began a new evolution of their own.
As for the us RPGWWers, on our ezB RPGWW, we were giddy with our new-found forum. The ability to create subforums was perhaps one of the most indispensable new features: RPs could be separated from spam, spam from discussions, discussions from art, art from RPGWW and RPGW comic discussion. Having our own admins and moderators was also incredibly useful--or, rather, the abilities they have to delete spam, block spammers, and move posts. The ability to customize images and colors was also quickly utilized, as were custom postranks.
The original administrators of the ezB RPGWW were Suicidal Sprite (also the ezOp), Archmage, DMSCV, and pdRydia. Later admins would be Squintz Altec, Kai, and Idran1701 while pdRydia would step down to moderator.
Independent phpBB
Yuku is to be the next evolution of the ezBoard forums which has been in development since 2005. As of January 2007, ezBoard is to run for at least another 12 months (as per an administrator on the yuku.com boards); however, switchover from ezB to yuku is not planned or described as an opt-in, opt-out business.
On 5 January 2007, Idran posted the topic Should we move to another forum? Prompting the post were two primary concerns; [1] the cost of gold renewal, a concern previously expressed by the community at large, and [2] the potential that the script for importing our threads from the ezB to the phpBB may well break with further yuku changes.
There were many pros associated with moving and less cons. The most convincing pros, in addition to the lowered upkeep cost, centered around the customizable qualities of the phpBB. Ease in transferring threads and user accounts was likely also a major deciding factor.
Cons included the loss of posticons and personal icons as well as the ability for individual posters to set a post-per-page limit.
After the move was agreed upon and both threads and user accounts were transferred, it was discovered that many user accounts experienced lowered postcounts. Postcounts themselves did not transfer to the phpBB, but the transferred posts of a user counted toward the 'new' postrank. However, a number of user posts from the ezB era were gone; in the ezB setup, forums had a limit of 20 pages of threads per subforum, and only 25 threads per page. As a result of this, the more active subforums (OOC, Kotoki's, Discussion, Testing, Fanart) regularly "lost" threads when new ones were posted and were "pushed off the edge of the forum" or "eaten."
Today
With the move of RPGWW to the phpBB board, Idran also moved the RPGWW website from its then-current address of zeke.tzo.com/rpgww over to the same hosting as the forum. Now the forums are found at forums.rpgww.org and the website at rpgww.org.
