If you've been to a number of other small sites, you may notice that the admin tends to make a post about every little change to the board.  Since I just have to be different, I generally don't - I typically make some change every day or so, without notifying anyone :P

So I've decided to go against that today and comment that this site has grown a lot bigger than I ever had initially expected.

I'd like to take the opportunity to give a little rundown of the history of this website, since I've never done so before.

The Beginning
So how did I start this?  I was spending most of my time writing Simple Popstation GUI in those days.  A former member of PSP-Hacks decided to start his own forum at PunBB-Hosting, and asked me to help admin it.  Since I had never admin'd a forum before, I was like "heck, why not?" and agreed.
After about one day, I realized that his attitude was just totally "wrong" and knew the site wouldn't succeed.  Nonetheless, I just watched to see how things went.  Before that, I had only ever joined large forums, since I preferred discussion, but after becoming admin of that tiny forum, I realized that small communities can have their niceties too.
I also joined a few other misc small forums during that time too.

One day, about a week later, when I couldn't be bothered working on Simple Popstation GUI, I decided to have a go at starting a website.  I had always wanted to have a homepage, but never had the chance to make one.
So I signed up to Freehostia (the account is still active!) - I had tried a few hosts for sticking my files up originally, but they were all pretty bad (the Freehostia page just directs you to here).
The site was just some HTML pages - I spent some time writing them up.  For the sake of history, I've uploaded them here (don't expect all the links to work).
Originally I had planned to have more stuff in the "Random Stuff" section (maybe some download lists; now I host some of the download lists I originally wanted to stick up, but in the form of packages instead of lists).
A forum was kinda at the back of my mind at the time - I mainly wanted a homepage (I still haven't really made a homepage yet...).  But since I was going on a PHP host, I thought I may as well see what setting up a forum was like.

For the forum software, I looked through a few (admittedly, only PunBB, phpBB and MyBB).  MyBB impressed me out of the three, so I downloaded MyBB 1.2.2 and installed it.  Then I ran through the mods site and started downloading themes and mods that interested me (not exactly the best thing to do over my connection).  I was quite impressed by MyBB, having seen PunBB and phpBB admin controls.
Anyway, got most of the forum set up on 19/01/2007.  The forum opened up on 20/01/2007, named "ZiNgA BuRgA's Random Forums" (or something similar).
I PM'd about 4-5 people from PSP-Hacks to join up.  Although this forum was mostly for me to fiddle around with things and see how to admin a board, a board is boring if no-one's on it :P  I also placed a link in my signature at PSP-Hacks.  Unlike most other small board admins, I wasn't too fond of advertising (thus the slow initial uptake of this forum).
What was the board about?  Originally I didn't want to be very PSP related, unlike most other small boards made by members from PSP-Hacks.  So it was mostly off-topic stuff.  Basically a place where I could post whatever I liked, do whatever I want without anyone complaining :P
The site aimed to be different to the typical forum, and highly experimental.  For example, initially, I made anyone who joined the forum a moderator.  This was based on a little theory I had, and, as I expected, it worked.  I also did a number of other things that most forums wouldn't even think about doing, such as not placing stickies/announcements about rules etc (I saw that most forums had a rather "pessimistic view" towards members, that is, boundaries need to be set in place; my theory was that most people are reasonable, and that setting hard boundaries is not necessary (aka an "optimistic view")).
But most of all, I wanted a fun place.
You can view a history of stuff in the links at the bottom of this post.

Meanwhile, the other site I was an admin of, had moved off PunBB-Hosting and onto a webhost.  The owner of the site got someone (Clint) to host it for him, and basically take care of all the technical stuff.  I'm still surprised how much effort Clint put into it, considering he basically got nothing from it.  They soon switched to MyBB, and later, switched to SMF.  I hadn't actually heard of SMF before.  Looking at it, I was somewhat impressed by the feature set, however, I was quickly dismayed at its design (very illogical, cluttered and ugly IMO).  Although I visited the site every day, and posted a fair bit, I was de-admin'd a few days later.  Had no idea why, but I stayed for a few days, saw that I wasn't going to become staff anymore, then left the site to rot (since I was one of the few things keeping the site alive).  And a few days later, the site was indeed, closed down.

During that time, I had also joined several other small forums to see how they worked, and what made them successful and what didn't.  Since I wanted this to be a break from the typical forum, I only used these findings as ideas.  For example, I still don't blatantly post advertising all over the place (in fact, I barely advertise anywhere).
I didn't like the idea of forcing users to sign up to view threads - I mean, do you like those boards?  I don't, so I'm certainly not going to impose those restrictions on my viewers.

Having been on PSP-Hacks for months, I was aware of the many idiots there (no, I don't mean stupid/misinformed people, I mean people who really have no thought for others).  I really wanted to focus on keeping those types of people away from here, and focus on keeping "quality members".  I'm glad at the results - I certainly like this community very much, and enjoy the discussions which are posted up.


Site Name and PSP focus
About the same time, dasme had started his own forum, focusing primarily on PSP stuff ("PSP MaX").  (a thing I found interesting, after one day of his site being up, he pretty much had all the members of my site at his; me wondering how, checked the PMs table, and saw that he sent a message to basically all my members...).  Later on, he decided that his site was unnecessary, and wanted to merge his site into this one.  This happened, but as a consequence, there was a stronger PSP focus.  Also, since he wanted a part in admin, the name of this site needed to be changed.
I didn't want it to be yet another "PSP____" site, so asked the members about what they thought.  |-Anubis-| was kind enough to think up a name which was used - "Endless Paradigm" (thanks |-Anubis-|!).
See here for original thread: http://endlessparadigm.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=262

A few weeks later, I got tired of updating my HTML pages, so I dropped them entirely, and made the entire site a forum.


Server moves
Around mid April, wee were getting about 200+ unique visitors a day.  Site hadn't really grown much - and at times, wee were only getting around 30 posts a day.
I decided to do another little experiment.  I had been working on a (PSP) topmenu for the 3.10 OE firmware so decided to post it up with certain conditions, trying to get some inbound links.
Well, I went to bed after posting it up.  Well, the next day, registered members went from about 200 to about 900.  Visitors in one day went from about 230 to 2550.  A much higher jump than I had originally expected, actually.  I exceeded the free host's CPU limit for those days actually.
But anyway, I was hitting Freehostia's 10MB MySQL limit anyway, so I really needed to move.

I hadn't dealt with any sort of online buying before then, so I was somewhat cautious about that.  Ge64 was kind enough to donate $1 to pay Freehostia for an extra 10MB of SQL space for a month, which gave me time to sort some things out.
Gavia offered to host my site for free on his shared host (which he wasn't really using).  At the same time, I had plans to buy a domain name.  So around mid April this forum finally got a domain name, and was off a free hosting service.


Another server move
Since I don't particularly enjoy piggy-backing off other people, I finally decided to pay for my own hosting, around June/July 2007.  Unfortunately, the cheapest I could find, which offered what I needed and supported PayPal was Lunarpages.  So I moved all the files across to the new server, and wee moved off Gavia's hosting service.
This was fine for about 1-2 months, but around early August, Lunarpages started complaining to me about excessive resource usage (I somewhat suspect this is a lie, as I was apparently using about 4x the allocated maximum CPU, and traffic had remained stable (so if the load was indeed excessive, you'd have expected them to complain about a month ago)).  So I basically tried to see if I could reduce server load, and basically, try to direct tonnes of questions towards them so that they'd keep my account alive, whilst I didn't have to upgrade the hosting service.


Yet another server move
About about 2 months of holding off complaints, I finally decided to commit to a VPS server.  I didn't particularly like the shared hosting that much anyway - I recall being locked out of my own website for a week, due to my IP falling under and IP range they eXx1l3d for DDoSing the server.
Anyways, the US$40/month cost (with less bandwidth and storage space) really wasn't to my liking, but I decided that I wouldn't be able to hold off complaints forever.  But I had enough money to cover it (wasn't too calm about transferring such a large amount over the internet) so paid for it.  I placed up some Google Ads to help compensate the cost of VPS hosting.
Since I was trying to get the cheapest deal, I didn't go with any control panel.  This was interesting, since my weak points in my computer knowledge would be Linux and Networking and I'm running a Linux webserver.
So I got the VPS server I'm on now (since the deal offered a free domain, I decided to use it and register zingaburga.com, which had previously been parked by someone else, but he refunded it (yay!)).  I spent about 3 whole days setting it up (although Linux is nice, I still don't like this part of it - you can follow a guide step by step, but there'll be some hickup somewhere in between steps).  But eventually, I got the server set up, and moved over the files yet again.
Being a Linux noob, I ran into all sorts of memory issues straight after the move.  I soon learnt about configuring Apache and MySQL to use less memory.

So that's pretty much how wee arrived on this server.




So what about the community?  Well, it's hard to identify pinnacles in this.  Probably the only thing I can think of now is when the PSP-Hacks' Graphics section closed down, many people started comming here.  The community has always been wonderful, and I have really enjoyed my time here (seriously!).

The development of the "void"
Well, this was interesting for me.  It started off when I was randomly editing language variables.  The "welcome back" message had a reference to "the Endless Void", and people seem to have picked that up, and just used it...

The development of "desu"
For that, wee can thank Sparker for his initial (and constant) desu spamming.



And...
Thanks a lot everyone, for making my time here fun and enjoyable :D
I hope you continue to enjoy your stay here!

---

Web history links:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://zing...hostia.com
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://endlessparadigm.com

Other random tidbits
- p0Wer's GameWarp forum was hosted here for a few days (I still actually have the files)
- ...BeAkEr...'s Muppet-Modding forum is hosted here, and has been for nearly a year

Initial Members
http://endlessparadigm.com/forum/memberl...&order=ASC
The three remaining active members from the first ten are michaelp, Sparker and Games like a Grrl.

(This post was last modified: 09/03/2008 10:27 PM by ZiNgA BuRgA.)

epic thread



all hail the viod


micheal p sparker and games ... damn lucky people..



i should have registered sooner i knew it

(This post was last modified: 09/03/2008 09:19 PM by Shady.)

Wow, that was a good read Zinga

* YoYoBallz loves the \/oiD

took awhile to read it (I'm a slow reader), but yeah that's great man thank you for having me and the rest of us in your site, its great that wee've grown this big and i really enjoy coming here, let us now aim for 200,000 posts! :)





* beaner2k6 does what yoyo does and says he loves the void too :)

(This post was last modified: 09/03/2008 09:25 PM by beaner2k6.)

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:The development of "desu"
For that, wee can thank Sparker for his initial (and constant) desu spamming.

>:3

~desuu

i should maybe goto muppet modding, what about hibby's hideout?

hibbyware decided to close his site.
I don't think that many people knew about it unfortunately.

i have a little capt morrigan left from 3 weeks ago, I'm taking a shot for us right now!







* beaner2k6 takes shot and is happy

Congratulations Zinga.

I remember the freehostia days like they were yesterday. (especially the everyone a moderator days)

I hope i have in some way helped with the site. Even if the section i mainly started cannot be mentioned. lol