History of Charas

From Charas Project

Revision as of 21:47, 17 January 2007

(this is a history of the forum, pieced together as best as possible from my own rambling memory and available posts that haven’t been deleted or something. Site history will be on a separate page and likely about 100 times harder to research…)

SaiKar wrote the core of this article. Have pity on his strained memory and add/clarify anything you can think of! Especially in the early days. Check the lingering questions part for specific holes I'm aware of.

The Beginning

The forum was established on January 19th, 2003 with this likely as its first post . Alex was (and remains) the webmaster and owner. De KoFfie , also known as Steven Rombauts, and Ralph Rombauts apparently coded the forum script itself. What SMB’s role in everything isn’t entirely clear, but it seems he was a sort of global Moderator and a keeper of the peace.

Apparently the forums were established as support for the Charas Generators and character set creation in general. Most of the original posts are questions about how to use and submit the generators and announcements on new generator features, though even early on there were off topic posts in the All of All.

For roughly a year, Charas stuck to the focus of the generators and RPG Programming. Three resource contests were held to gather resources. Non-RPGMaker talk was light. Moderator positions were relatively unimportant. There was essentially no drama between anyone that can be seen today. Alex frequented the boards most every day, and the generators were upgraded often.

It is an interesting piece of trivia that all languages were welcome on Charas at the beginning, but almost immediately English became the only accepted language. Alex himself conducted all business in English despite being Italian himself, and did this “Because this is an INTERNATIONAL forum!!!!”

RRWP and the First New Mods

Enter into paradise in January 2004 RRWP, a somewhat tragic historical figure. To understand RRWP you need to understand Charas at this point in time. The atmosphere was one of almost construction and optimism. Literally not a disparaging word could be seen anywhere on the forum. Every change of any kind was greeted with cheering and enthusiasm. And Charas maintained this for an entire year. I know this sounds surreal, but it’s true. Read 2003 posts if you don’t believe it.

RRWP was a talented spriter and game maker that had come to Charas for basically the same reason everyone else did at this point; to share resources. The difference was that RRWP was a critic. If he thought something was poorly done, he said so, but in a very constructive criticism-type way. Likewise, if he thought something was good, he said so. He wasn’t even mean about it or anything. But the very fact that he dared speak his mind in a negative way threw Charas into turmoil.

The forum at large was revolted by RRWP’s criticisms, of which he gave out often. He was basically branded as a troll and became very disliked quickly. Midnight had a small fight with him, the details of which that are lost. Gary, a well respected moderator that had been at the forum from near the beginning, got into a larger fight with him, the details of which are also lost. Most everyone didn’t like RRWP except for one spriter named SaiKar who sympathized with him. Yet the forum wasn’t entirely on Gary’s side either, for he was being rather dirty in the fight.

The culmination of all this happened when Alex created a “Gary vs. RRWP” thread and them promptly went on vacation. In the thread Alex encouraged people to “vote” on who was better, RRWP or Gary, in sort of a tongue-and-cheek manner. Long story short, all hell broke lose. Both RRWP and Gary got real dirty and lots of other people didn’t help much. Sai tried to defend his friend RRWP and end the fighting so Alex wouldn’t come back to a mess of a forum. It didn’t help much, but this made Alex notice Sai as a community figure.

In the aftermath, RRWP left the forums, saying (rightly so) that the immaturity was appaling. Gary got demoted from being a moderator. And Alex appointed several new mods to better watch over the forum. The new moderators were announced on Febuary 29th, 2004. Leap day! I’m sure that’s symbolic somehow. The appointment thread was deleted at some point, but as follows are Alex’s appointmens from the Private forum.

Saikar - All of All and requests

• Because he demonstrates good feeling with many users, really active on the forum and wise in calming down "riots" when needed.

Kairou - Magazine team

• It's his Team, and he is an old user of Charas (he knows how the forum works)

Reain_ - Beta Testers Team

• It's his Team, he's an active member, often good also in difficult discussions.

Smo or Midnight - Net Hunters Team

• Again, it's their team, but better to have just one mod per Team.
• I think they've to talk between themselves to say me who will become Mod here. (note from editor – Smokey won this position)

GaryCXJk - Movie Team

• It's his Team, he never left it. Plus he's the only one who really takes care of it, i think it should be better if he can manage it.

FFL2and3rocks - Resources and Gallery

• Old user, incredible "recolorer" and huge BMP hunter.
• I think he can helps a lot with new users and their first "graphics experiences" on these boards.

Rowan - Tutorials

• Active memeber, plus the tutorial section was an idea of him.
• Mainly here he can check the goodness of posted things and add eventual addons.

Things generally calmed down, though RRWP’s legacy became permanent. Gone were the days of absolute optimism and a total focus on the generators, and replacing them was the rise of All of All and off-topic discussion as the main focus of Charas’s forums. Some were bitter to see the old days go, but on the upside the non-RPGMaker focus drew a lot of oddball people that would have probably found the forum too boring to hang around otherwise.

Chaos and the Tightening Fist

Broken out of the “all RPGMaker all the time” mold, the spring and summer of 2004 brought Charas considerable growth, but not all of it entirely good. Spam and personal attacks began to become a major problem and it didn’t take very long for the off-topic aspect of Charas to reach a boiling point. By mid summer most everyone’s nerves began to fry. Even with three All of All moderators (Kijuki, Darkfox, and SaiKar) the influx of bad feelings became overwhelming. Even Forum Gaming was full of more spam than usual.

Several moderators such as Kairou and Smokey lost their modship for stupid reasons. The whole Pop incident, the details of which still confuse me, happened around this time. Naysayers declared the end of Charas, as naysayers are wont to do. To quote Sai in the private forum, “It seems like half the topics are spam and the other half are people complaining spam.” Also, a lot of people created joke accounts to confuse and spam with impunity.

Tired of watching Charas slip away down a dark road, Alex made a few adjustments. One of the first was in April and countered smiley overuse by limiting posts to a total of 8 smileys maximum. On July 3rd, 2004 he promoted Darkfox and Kijuki to Global Mods; moderators of all forums, so that they could better watch over the forum as a whole and fight increasing spam. To replace them at All of All Alex held elections for moderators that Reain and Trevlac won. A few people, mainly Apex, annoyed the hell out of Trevlac by posting a lot of spam, but it was later revealed to be a test authorized by Alex.

Things didn’t really calm down; it was more like there were enough people watching to lock or delete the spam before too much piled up. Also, Darkfox began doing very odd things with his new powers. He deleted apparently random posts in odd places and edited other posts to make the original poster look stupid. There was a big controversy surrounding deletion of Seth Aechi’s posts, though it’s rather disturbing and best not to go into. Darkfox also started a lot of arguments on the forums he was supposed to be modding. Tired of cleaning up after his messes in All of All, SaiKar retired from that forum on July 23rd, preferring to focus more on Requests and real-life concerns. On the other hand, Trevlac changed his forum profile to female and started hitting on people (including Alex) and also created two fake accounts himself. Needless to say the two didn’t get along very well, and Trevlac and Darkfox fought often in the shadows of the Private forum.

Wahba (who later admitted to being Osmose) spammed the absolute crap out of some forums on August 25th and the “one post per minute” rule was implemented to prevent further such actions. Kairou continued to make vague threats about killing people and got banned September 6th. These were the signs of the times.

And in one was probably record bad timing, Alex announced in mid September 2004 that he wasn’t going to be on the forum much due to his impending marriage. In reality, this was the last time he would be on the forum much at all other than to check in with people. But before taking off to start his new life with his wife, on September 28th he appointed Request mod SaiKar as an Administrator of the forums, a move that would alter how the forums were run forever.

Lingering Questions

• Does anyone really remember Pop and Kairou and the whole conspiracy there? I think I missed that entirely.
• Why do I need some cheese?

Sources

In pseudo-chronological order

• Alex's first post - http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2&forumid=2&catid=2
• Gary’s “A history of Charas” - http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=15958&forumid=12&catid=6
• My own LiveJournal, an oddly good source for events and dates back then - http://saikar.livejournal.com/tag/charas
• Several other CharasWiki pages - RRWP, Pop, and Trevlac
• Lots of sneaky Private forum threads you can’t read.