The org's TEN YEAR anniversary...

[Kagemusha]

We definetely need somekind of 10 years birthday event. I wonder what the exact day of birth might have been?

[Kurando]

I wonder what the exact day of birth might have been?

Good question... According to my desktop records the site DNS mainpage officially opened Friday April 2nd, 1999. And the message board that we all know and love, The Sword Dojo, (now known as The Guild), officially opened April 14th 1999.

I retro-fitted a few of the membership join dates when we switched the board to vBulletin 1.0 in summer of 2000. We did this to facilitate the memebership explosion we experienced pending the release of Shogun Totalwar in June of 2000. For the first year we had a different ezboard message board that was red, green, and black in colour, and the original vBulletin 1.0 board was babyblue; the current board colours were adopted somewhere around 2003, but the old blue colour scheme was carefully preserved and still exists in the Guild's current Sword Dojo.

I remember for the first year before the demo was released we tried to stay focused on History and Strategy, the Art of War and whatnot; if fact, believe it or not, there was no off-topic content allowed on the board (not even frontroom-type stuff). ;) Surprisingly members were okay with this and we didn't have many problems moderating, but there were probably only a few dozen active posters before the demo came out so it was much easier than you might think to keep things on track.

totalwar.org got a big break earily spring of 2000 when some patrons from the UK somehow talked the Creative Assembly Team into giving .org a hands-on look at the demo. Richie and the rest of the CA Team were really good to the us, and our guys who got to see the S:TW Beta kept us inspired and on-track during the game's pre-demo days.

Interestingly in the earily days we had an arch-rival site "www.plannettotalwar.com" -There were some cool guys over there, but we managed to stay ahead of them and eventually .org became established as the place to be. At the time I think planettotalwar.com had a reputation as a "players site" and .org had more a reputation as an "info site", but we had good info that's for sure. Guys like PUZZ3D understood the mechanics of the game very intimately and helped a lot of people out. Also we had some serious historians, great modders, and apt story writers here at .org and they pulled together to keep forum content interesting.

So that's how it all started, but that's only the smallest fraction of how it got to where it is now. We owe the real thanks to Tosa and company. And most especially to the patrons; without whom this whole endevour would have amounted to nothing.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the old gal. ;)

[Banzai!]

Good question... According to my desktop records the site DNS mainpage officially opened Friday April 2nd, 1999. And the message board that we all know and love, The Sword Dojo, (now known as The Guild), officially opened April 14th 1999.

I retro-fitted a few of the membership join dates when we switched the board to vBulletin 1.0 in summer of 2000. We did this to facilitate the memebership explosion we experienced pending the release of Shogun Totalwar in June of 2000. For the first year we had a different ezboard message board that was red, green, and black in colour, and the original vBulletin 1.0 board was babyblue; the current board colours were adopted somewhere around 2003, but the old blue colour scheme was carefully preserved and still exists in the Guild's current Sword Dojo.

I remember for the first year before the demo was released we tried to stay focused on History and Strategy, the Art of War and whatnot; if fact, believe it or not, there was no off-topic content allowed on the board (not even frontroom-type stuff). ;) Surprisingly members were okay with this and we didn't have many problems moderating, but there were probably only a few dozen active posters before the demo came out so it was much easier than you might think to keep things on track.

totalwar.org got a big break earily spring of 2000 when some patrons from the UK somehow talked the Creative Assembly Team into giving .org a hands-on look at the demo. Richie and the rest of the CA Team were really good to the us, and our guys who got to see the S:TW Beta kept us inspired and on-track during the game's pre-demo days.

Interestingly in the earily days we had an arch-rival site "www.plannettotalwar.com" -There were some cool guys over there, but we managed to stay ahead of them and eventually .org became established as the place to be. At the time I think planettotalwar.com had a reputation as a "players site" and .org had more a reputation as an "info site", but we had good info that's for sure. Guys like PUZZ3D understood the mechanics of the game very intimately and helped a lot of people out. Also we had some serious historians, great modders, and apt story writers here at .org and they pulled together to keep forum content interesting.

So that's how it all started, but that's only the smallest fraction of how it got to where it is now. We owe the real thanks to Tosa and company. And most especially to the patrons; without whom this whole endevour would have amounted to nothing.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the old gal. ;)

Interesting. Is there a full history of the ORG from 1999-2009?