by Four Degreez
It was late 1996 when I discovered my first message board--well the first one that I took an interest in, anyway. It was at 9inchnails.com, and was a "wwwboard"-style board, like the 4K boards are (my formative experiences definitely play into how this site is set up). This board was a high quality place with some real smart people, so we talked about a lot more than NIN. I met blueLuke on this board.
Shortly after, I joined up at nineinchnails.net, which had eight boards (the most popular of which were News, Miscellaneous (equivalent to our Random), and Flame). This is where I met people like Samael and tallman. The guy who ran the site was a total absentee admin, which was a blessing and a curse. Blessing, because there was so much freedom, curse because it got a little out of control sometimes. The people of the 9inchnails.com board looked down on the nineinchnails.net boards. But they were more fun.
I also started going to Bolt.com, which was essentially a vacuous teenage wasteland. But it had its bright spots. I spent time on a programming board, the Bolt version of "Comments/Updates" (some admins got to know me a little, an encouraged me to apply for a job with Bolt!), and the religious debate boards. On the religious boards is where I met people like Rashind and Sovawanea.
So anyway I'm a member of these boards and whatnot, but I thought it would be cool if I could be in charge of a board. I had my own little NIN site going (hosted on my college web space), so I put a free board on there, and got a feel for what it was like to be the guy in charge. It was neat.
Some more time passes, and now it's 1998. I sign up for a paid hosting account because I want to fool around with making web sites. My host supported a language called Mivascript, so I see what I can do with it. I made a jokes site, and then a quotation site. Then I get the ill-fated idea to create my own index/search engine of alternative rock band fan sites. And while I'm into building that site, I decide maybe I can put some boards up on it. Some guy had written a wwwboard-style message board script in Mivascript and distributed it freely, so I took that and modified it so that there would be a login, and I added PMs and profiles. This was October, 1998. And at this time, the nineinchnails.net and Bolt religious boards were starting to suck, so I said, "Hey guys, come on over to my boards; we'll make a new site." I introduced my NIN peeps to my Bolt peeps, and that's what started it all.
The whole alternative rock band search engine thing got scrapped pretty quickly, and in January 1999 the place was rechristened "4degreez.com".
By around 2002, I felt that 4degreez.com was too limited. For one, I was spending way too much time dealing with troll issues. And secondly, the Mivascript language, while quite useful, was just too limited, in my opinion. So I decided to rewrite everything from scratch in java code, with a true relational database behind it (PostgreSQL). And many of the things here are ideas that I had from the 4degreez-era, like the immigration process for preventing trolls, and the collecting of icons, and the "my posts" page and "new!" notices on posts. To be honest, I haven't even implemented all the ideas I had back in 2002, let alone new ideas...I just don't have the time!
So anyway, this rebuilt 4degreez.com opened for business in Februrary, 2004. I went with the name "4thKingdom" as both a shout-out to the old 4degreez, and also because it sounded kind of medievalish. Why would I want it to sound medieval? Well, I decided to go with a medieval-themed status system and had all these ideas about merchants and wizards and whatnot, and I thought it all kind of played into this RPGish experiment I was trying.
To be honest, you guys are all on a half-finished site. I hope that I will have time to implement all of the remaining ideas, but I don't think I'll have that kind of time until at least the end of the year, or maybe next year. And that's just to get started!