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The PWCF as we’ll call it, was using the free and ancient release of IPB 1.3. IPB was a big name in forum software, but they’d gone to a paid model after 1.3. There wasn’t much at all to choose from. You had SMF (the last DualFans forum was SMF after the phpBB attack got us) or phpBB pretty much. Being that we’d been there and crashed that… I went with IPB. I’ll tell you later why some of this is important.

But I setup the PWCF, sent out e-mails, IM’s, whatever I could to reach people. Told Kazuki it would be a tempoary forum till host.sk got their act together or we got a backup file. I managed to reach maybe 10 to 15 people, maybe as high as 20 tops over the lifetime of the PWCF. I spent many hours trying to hunt down screen names and e-mails for old members, didn’t get very far on my own. We had Andyscout, shadowdance, jacob keyes, mitsuki lover, animegodfather, neo7, cap, Xtor, Genkill00, and Xearo show back up over time. Managed to locate COhugh, who I’d always been on good terms with, and got a very angry worded reply back that he wanted nothing to do with us again. It was in very stark contrast to all he’d done for the community over the years. But there we sat pretty much, sort of hoping we’d hear one day that host.sk would fix itself. I made some forum banners, decorated the place. We started a real simple little translation section on the board, for machine translated using OCR. Found some more Japanese fan sites, loaded up a lot of pictures to Photobucket. Shadowdance and I were good friends, so we IM’d back and forth a lot. We started working on a online card game for Dual, using an online system called OCTGN, based off his fanfiction, the Dual series, and other info. Generally things were fairly bleak.

I began to also drift away from the fandom, I wasn’t a web designer – so I couldn’t build a new site. Kazuki was gone. All our work into the Tribute was shot and I didn’t even have most of those files on the site. The AFC was roughly a exercise in patience. I stopped by Tenchiboard to say hi and post what I had for sale in case anyone wanted it. My account and posts ended up being deleted for inactivity. Talked to BobN64 he offered us hosting if we wanted to rebuild DualFans, but again, no skills to do that with so we had to wait.

GXP dubbed did come out in the states from Funimation during this time. Picked up the DVDs that pertained to the Dual episodes, once again saw how every fit together in the overall Tenchi-verse. I also managed to get my hands on some stupid expensive copies of the Dual laser discs, DVDs, and other JP goods. In that process found out we’d been duped in the USA when it came to what was with the Pioneer DVDs. All that info, or what I could manage with all the other troubles in life going on, was put up on the forum. But in general, things were very dull and looking like we were going no where. I realized somewhere along the way that the PWCF wasn’t going to be a backup forum, it was all we had.

Let me cover another part of Tenchi forum history here, one that wasn’t ever really revealed to the public. In 2005 still, a new Tenchi forum was started up pretty quietly, this being TenchiHate. Now that’s hate as in Japanese (like ha ya te), it didn’t mean what it sounds like in English. If I recall right, the owners were a husband and wife pair that went by Quan and Mu. The main purpose of the forum was to translate the Tenchi novels, mainly the OVA set. Well word did get out to Tenchiboard and AFC, for a while it was very quiet, not many people went there. Quan and Mu released just a little material, some pages or chapters. What it ended up being was a whole bunch of people came over and the debates over this or that exploded. Most of it was really stupid, but everyone was hanging on every word again, demanding the latest translation from Quan or Mu. I can remember some really venomous threads, people damning other people for having an opinion or a high opinion of their own views. It got to the point I quit reading most of the posts as it was nothing but a slug fest, people starting even worse fights than at AFC because Quan and Mu just didn’t moderate their board.

Well TenchiHate vanished in the space of a night. We never heard from Quan or Mu again. People waited… waited, and then rumors started popping up about why they were wiped from the web. What I learned a year or two later, was that Quan had been contacted by the Japanese publishers of the novels, and had in no uncertain terms been threatened with serious legal action if he didn’t close down immediately. So what they accomplished, and all that therein, disappeared. This is why we can’t have nice things… Honestly I find it amazing that the publishers even knew of TenchiHate. It wasn’t promoted, it barely had been noticed on the main English forums. AIC had somewhat notoriously ignored the fandom since the closing of the AIC YaBBs, we were cut off from Kajishima (who he himself once said he was not aware his series were popular outside of Japan at all) so how it was “outed” or the details of all that I don’t know. Just has always seemed odd.

But anyway, I got a e-mail I think from ANB one day asking if I would help him admin or mod the AFC.

I replied back that I could, I supposed I would be able to part time or something. I’d run PWCF and modded DualFans. I had other issues to deal with too. ANB was pretty vague on why he needed me to help him.

So I got drafted basically, got admin access to the AFC’s private section. Jeff and Mary were fed up, had too many things going on in life, and frankly would have liked to choke the life out of some people. They were disgusted. Beagle-san could not and did not want to run the board full time, he was still living out of shelters or something due to Katrina. He wasn’t thrilled with the actions of the members either. The consensus was to close AFC down, the mature people had mostly left, Tenchi was winding down. Enough was enough. Might as well at least be the last ones to shut out the light.

ANB made a plea, and that being that if he couldn’t find some people to help him mod/admin the board in about a week, they’d close. Well ANB got me and Full Gonzo pretty much right away. I came in the admin section, promptly read everything… and was going back to ANB saying that he should have never let it get that far, he could have said something to me earlier. The old posts in the private section were littered back to the dawn of the board with moderation reports, discussions on what to do this time with person X, so n so is fighting with the other one for the billionth time, etc etc etc. So I sorta “got” why Jeff and Mary were leaving, mostly due to real life, but even though I read the logs and have been on the other side of the line so to speak, I didn’t understand what I was getting myself into in reality.

Around this same time, since I was mod at Seto’s Fan, antvasima or shadow writer also gave up on maintaining the Questions for Kajishima list, and requested someone to take it over. I sort of volunteered for that since no one else would. Basically it was a post, over 100 questions long of things the fans wanted to get answers to. The plan had been to pick a stopping point, get a translator to convert it and then send it to KM and AIC, hopefully get another 101 Secrets out of it. Well other than some tweaking, I didn’t do anything with it after I took control. Seto’s Fan just sat there most of the time. It’d crashed or got hacked in the past so the post counts were always way way off.

Well back to AFC. I wasn’t actually familiar with Gonzo much, as I said I’d been staying away from AFC for the most part. But he was an older gentleman, former school teacher, wasn’t a Tenchi zealot or anything, played brass instruments – level headed. He usually spent the most time at AFC, actually watching everything going on. ANB at the beginning was like around half the time. I was between ANB and Gonzo.

Now comes the hard part for me to describe, just how was the state of the board that we tok over. Well you had members that were on the fringe or generally tried to stay out of things. You had a couple knowledgeable folks left. Then you had either targets or attackers. Frequently we had to moderate threads for people trying to start crap by baiting other members…. and I mean constantly. If they weren’t insulting directly it was veiled. If they were stirring things like that up, they were having flame wars over the pm system through ezboard or over E-mail. If they weren’t making sexual comments about the characters, they were doing so against other members. Playing coy or stupid, brushing it off or playing with words was typical. The bottom line was their purpose in life was to cause chaos, other wise life was just too friggen boring for them to stomach. So pretty much every week, or other week, we’d have a temp ban. We’d have ANB telling people to back off, to which they replied that he enjoyed it.. blah blah blah. We also had a resident troll (yes I know that term applies to so many actually) that would spam the board with extremely vulgar posts, targeting the admin staff, but mostly aimed at ANB directly.

So here’s the thing. ezboard was old. It was 90’s software, probably millions of ezboards were made. It was centralized, so you could make one account and then post on other ezboards, or make a board local account. But it was just a hair above a BBS essentially. We couldn’t even split topics, move posts, pretty much any “standard thing” since like 2003. With everything centralized we couldn’t do much besides temp or permaban a user name from accessing the board. Problem was, all you had to do was start a new ez account and bang you’re back in. So trying to admin anything effectively, was futile.

In 2008, ezboard up and decided that they’d redesign their system and forcibly switch everyone to the new Yuku system. Besides the outages that messed with the board several times, they managed to move us over eventually. There really was nothing to love about the update. Lots of things broke like the color scheme and backgrounds we had for the AFC. I’d almost say adminning got harder not easier. Ads were integrated into everything, where as before we’d had members pay for ad free premium service.

At this same time, the primary pain in our side was visibly trying to incite displeasure in the members against us and the Yuku change. If someone goes around and whispers in enough ears, and complains enough to get on that person’s side like they are fighting for a cause, they can rally troops. So we had a mild little uprising of members bitching and moaning about how things were and saying we should step down and the de facto leader of the uprising be put into our place. Of course this person acted as though they’d done nothing, it’d be an honor to be placed in that position if that’s what the members wanted. Manipulative BS. Well we weren’t having any of that, they couldn’t force us to stop adminning the board, and there was no way to usurp us directly. So it’s like the village farmers beating on the door of the castle gate. No way to get in, so they could only make noise and just get tired.

In truth, since the Yuku switch we’d been talking about moving the AFC already. Between all the problems, ezYuku wasn’t working. I brought up a few times to ANB that we’d be better off moving – why not use the same system as my PWCF? At that time it’d been stable, I knew the controls, it’d give us much more to work with. We checked out a couple systems, ANB picked the IPB finally. We had already setup a test board, which we configured to do what we wanted. We finally spilled the beans that we would be making a mandatory move to the new board, and the old one would be closed, but viewable. Well of course our little firestarter piped up like they’d won a great victory, the people had spoken and the admins had bowed to their demands… well whatever floats your boat.

So people moved over, notices were made to Tenchiboard and Sanctuary. We had the usual moving pains. Yuku like it was, there was no database we could grab, in order to move posts, so that all had to be left behind. People complained about the board style not being a BBS type, etc etc. But we had much better admin controls, we had logs, we had tools and things now. A few of the “fringe” people came back to the board and tried to post, hoping thing would be better with the promise of a new forum.

In general, I’d say we lost about a third of the usual posters in the move. Still had the usual trouble makers, but things were toned down a little bit. We got some new members, like Will1984 and ChaosCore that helped me with doing some translation of the doujinshis. conawn, who by that time went by Kamiki Takashi Jurai, also helped some.

We had a rules post on the board, but we still had problems, notably suggestive or hentai material being posted by certain people, picking on other members. Same old problems, just they came and went, it ebbed and flowed like the tide. They’d cause everyone to pull their hair out, then back off just enough, let it settle, then start again. Come to think of it it’s like a military torture process to get you to break.

So things got dull again, a new board does not a new series make. ANB was working as a mod for the Funimation forums I think by then. So I think we’d been in the loop as to OVA 3 and it was starting to come out on DVD. GXP had been running in an endless loop on the Funimation Channel, which was a couple hour anime block on Sat TV. But when things get boring, the trolls get antsy. So back to the trying to start up topics by any means necessary to hear themselves talk again…

I’ll also state here that from then on we got a constant increase in attacks by “vulgar troll” – when we moved it was all “it” declaring victory and expletives and BS, I get tired thinking about it. Anyway we got hit with spam bots, all the InvisionPlus hosted boards did. The software was old, and wasn’t secure enough, nor did the host care enough to put in proper measures against it. So we ended up having to lock down the board, put everything on administration approval only. That didn’t help matters with the members any. Me and Gonzo were watching the board round the clock at all hours trying to catch spam posts. Managed to only let a few slip through out of several hundred a day. We finally got a different captcha put on the board that dealt with that issue mostly.

Let me step off to the side here to talk about the Abh’s before I finish off AFC’s and PWCF’s stories.

As I said a ways back, most of the TechTV folk fled to the Abh Nation. They had a paid IPB board with the support, new bells and whistles. They had older members that had jobs, paid for the hosting and expenses, as well as were network or web security trained. They had people that knew Japanese, they had many well rounded members that stuck around. They had elections for staff, bylaws, sort of a charter. To me they were kind of the ideal 1 series board and site setup. The site owner there went by ACIDSTEALTH. I’d been over there as I’d also liked Crest and Banner of the Stars. Tried to stop by an see what was going on. During the big multi board hack attempt they managed to ward them off, another concentrated attack directly against Abh Nation years later was dealt with over a couple months. One big highlight for them was Tokyopop came to them to help with the translation of the Crest of the Stars novels for the domestic US release (CotS has it’s own full alphabet as well). They got credited in the shelf copies. But there was a split among the members due to their work being leaked, that tained several things.

During the PWCF’s sluggish period I was looking for any way to maybe build up the site. I knew by then that single series focused forums, without new information, without members willing to participate, or without tons of money input, were doomed to fail. In the latter years of AN members left the site due to what I would l find out later was Acid frankly being a jerk and trying to assert too much control. So after a big split where AN lost almost the whole staff team, and quite a few of the regular members – Acid was looking to also beef up their forum again. I forget who made the initial proposal, but we started talking about combining forums. Ended up all he was willing to do was make a subsection inside another subsection, for Dual, and we would not be allowed to bring over any posts… we’d have to close the old board. I’d be assigned to moderate only that subsection, while we’d be expected to use and post in all the regular Abh parts of the board. Well that’d strip us totally of any identity as DualFans. It wasn’t a merger, it was leasing a billboard on the side of the road. So I said no.

In the end, Acid was being more of a dictator over how everything was to be done and run (granted it’s his site/board) and that pushed people away. He wanted to get into other things, felt betrayed or something by the people that left. No one was allowed to talk about them, so as you can imagine – he finally said he was closing AN. This actually came as a shock to me, I’d always expected AN to outlive all us other boards. So once again people started trying to make up new places to go.

I started yet another forum, this time on Forummotion hosting, called Kin of the Stars. Had a lot of more recent features than the IPB 1.3 stuff, had better support boards. Etc Etc. I skinned it up, and tried to let people know I was making it as an option for a safe haven cause AN was closing pretty soon. Well I got a E-mail from Acid saying that I couldn’t use my banner cause it had an image in it that was in his gallery (I’d used Google actually), I was not allowed to use any images or content whatsoever from his site, even if they were DVD covers or like actual images from Japan, not fan made stuff. He also claimed every post anyone ever made on the forum, the rights belonged to him alone, and if I went ahead anyway, he’d complain to the host, he make such a stink about it, that I’d be shut down and never heard from again.

So naturally I replied back the truck up here… the original creator of the series owns the images, not you. The same goes for the forum posts and fanfiction, etc. Anything not created by you, ie owning the copyright or license to, isn’t yours. So we got into a heated back and forth over that. Fortunately other people were getting the same treatment and brought it out on the forums, enough public outcry happened that he relented. The AN site and forum would be archived, people could go do what they wanted. So we did. Abh Nation closed and was indeed archived.

Kin of the Stars was ok for a little while, we were better off than some. Most of the “refugees” ended up at Project Haruhi after the fall out. But while Kin was a pretty board, with nice features and things, we suffered from a few problems. 1. We were still a single series board and by then the info had totally dried up. B. I was managing at least 4 forums (I’d started a video game mod project too) so I couldn’t be around full time. C. I’d made a critical error in picking Forummotion. That being that they also used sort of a hybrid IPB / phpBB system and considered all your posts their property. So no backups. One of the former AN members had worked on forum conversion scripts, so when we were in a slump we thought about combining several forums together so we’d solve some of our problems.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t around as often as he said he’d be. That went no where cause I had no knowledge of the setup methods. So Kin sat and did nothing, much like PWCF unfortunately.

OK back to AFC and PWCF. At PWCF Kazuki had resolved some of his family problems, and was looking at getting DSL finally. So he was starting to pop up a bit more often. Mentioned that he wanted to build a new DualFans site. I’d tried to rally the members at PWCF, a few times. Essentially saying we need members, here’s where we can go and advertise, here’s lists of old members from what I found ages ago that was too much for me to do alone. If we can’t get something going, we’re probably done for, we’re doomed to sit and be lethargic forever. Well folks kinda sorta thought about, couldn’t get anyone to commit. Tried again 2 more times. Last one I had Jacob Keyes offer to help, but we didn’t get more than a couple days into it before it got shoved under the rug.

At AFC our “vulgar troll” was outright attacking ANB in full force, round the clock. If he couldn’t post directly with a fresh account, he’d make posts waiting for admin approval so we’d see them. If that wasn’t enough, he’d put vulgar things as the email address and name he registered with. He was spamming ANB’s blog, he was spamming Funimation. If ANB was there, so this psychotic stalker was too. The funny thing is that when it came to AFC, it was going through mostly Gonzo, and if not him, me and rarely got to ANB unless we posted one of his flaming vulgar rants in the admin section to add it to ANB’s collection. ANB was getting death threats, I do recall he got mail at his old address one time (he was trying to move then) full of threats. The nutcase was certifiable. It was a round the clock job just to deal with the psycho for Gonzo, and the troll would hit on him quite heavily too, though it was limited to e-mails and the forum. Plus we had the members doing their usual antics half the time.

Whoever we temp-banned our main public firestarter, the troll would go into overdrive and all the messages would be laced on how that person was the greatest, most wonderful thing compared to us, the only thing keeping the board alive, on and on endlessly. We were the bad guys, the judas, the *bleep*sucking, *bleep*ckers, stupid *bleep*gots, goat *bleeeeeeeeeeeeep* ‘ers that’d never come close to the wisdom and blah blah blah…. this is not one e-mail a day. This is every method of possible contact you have to yourself is getting bombed almost 24/7.

So let’s take account here. We’re working round the clock on a free forum against bots and psychopaths. A pretty good contingent of the board hates our guts. The good people won’t post cause they are just going to get attacked. ANB’s got a personal stalker. I’m managing multiple boards, a game project, and still in the middle of my parent’s disaster of a divorce. So as you might imagine, we were not happy admins.

Gonzo being a teacher, had the patience of a saint. He got to the point he had to take time away from the board like a vacation. He was thoroughly pissed. ANB left the AFC essentially in our hands and locked himself away sorta. Tried to pull the psycho away from the AFC and focused on himself at his blog, at least maybe make that sacrifice. We were trying… trying hard.. despite all the raw poop we’d been handed to make a board were people could just come and enjoy talking about Tenchi or whatever… chill out, have fun, and we never did get there. We were plagued with a disease from birth, that’s the truth of it.

Well in this timeframe, being 2006, I also toured some anime conventions, met up with some of the DualFans. Went to ACen, AX, and Ohayocon. Had seriously started looking at starting a con in the Louisville, KY area. LouiCon. So I’d been picking con leader’s brains and going to as much as I could. That didn’t end up panning out due to a change in heart. But if you’re ever interested in doing so, I’ll give you a helpful tidbit of info. The backdoor into all the conventions staff talk, is an old mailing list, called animecons-list, which I think is part of like baka updates.org or something like that. You can find it if you search. There used to be a “black book” too of how to run and start a con, not sure what became of that.

So getting back to our forum fun….

As to AFC, I imagine if you’re not one of the trolls, you’re asking why didn’t we just mass ban people. Kick them out, clear the deck. Well at ezboard it was a board issue, we didn’t have the tools. At IPB, I guess somehow you could say it was our own weakness and a couple other things. One being the trolls were using the Tor network to anonymize their IP addresses so you couldn’t just ban by IP and lock them out. They could log out log in and get a new IP and be back in 3 minutes time. So you’d have to keep everything on admin approval. I eventually came up with a potential way to break Tor and get their IP, but we ran into other issues before we got it ready. Second issue being we were low on people that were posting. While the problem members were indeed causing the very issue keeping people away, if we kicked them out, would we have any posts at all?

So that played a role. ANB self admittedly said he shouldn’t have given some of them as much rope as he had in the past. It allowed things to get out of hand rather than just putting his foot down. Me and Gonzo didn’t care nearly as much, but we had a 3 part admin staff. When it came to anything important, like banning or changes, we voted on it and the majority won. Clean and simple. So we ended up asking ANB a lot of the time… to ban or not to ban… and we’d let them off with a warning. Hours to days later… they’d be back at it.

So yeah some of it was our own fault for not being harder and just laying out the hammer.

Well let’s wrap some of this up shall we?

We were frustrated and angry with things in general. Our firestarter was basically blatantly doing whatever they pleased without fear of us. We weren’t stupid, compared to what they must have thought of all the AFC admins. We knew there were others involved. It was like a underground mafia. They’d collaborate to troll or incite chaos where we couldn’t see, over e-mail or the PM system. We knew about it 3rd hand.

So I got pissed and tired of it all. If you know me you know I’ve got one heck of a long fuse, this had been building for years and wasn’t fair to anyone, particularly the admins. So I set out to prove once and for all, that we had justification in permabanning this person. Well I first searched the existing the board. Read every post and compared it to the board rules. Made a list of 87 violations, with links and notes to each. Still wasn’t enough, we were wishy washy on it. What would the fallout be?

Well I’d been acquainted with this particular person (who’d changed their name several times over the years I might add). Helped them with things like gathering images, sold them stuff, they’d given me some of their web hosting space back in the day before photobucket came into being. So I was the “friendly” admin requests or questions were asked of. They wouldn’t go to Gonzo, didn’t like him. ANB was a toy or a pincushion to them, wouldn’t take him seriously. When we started the IPB AFC… I was directly asked a important question, which had seemed out of place to my brain, so it stuck. That question was can the admins, see what we send over the PM system? In honesty, I answered no.

Well after all the poop, here we were. I came up with the idea of getting into their PMs to get the proof. I asked ANB and Gonzo, told them right off the bat I felt dirty and disgusting for even bringing up the idea, but something had to be done. Explained it, etc. They were still unsure. I thought about it for about 2 days straight, conflicting over if it was right to do, how it would be done, what if I didn’t find anything? My gut just wouldn’t hush up, it HAD to be there…

In the end I did it of my own choice, and here’s how. I set the board to service mode, which put up a service page blocking access to the board. I reset that member’s password to something I knew, and logged back in as them. Lo and behold… there in the PMs was several messages with at least 2 other members detailing how they were going to post as each other and troll the board. B I N freaking G O.

Made screenshots of all that, logged out. Fixed up the board and posted the evidence for the other admins. Clear proof tipped it over, we perma banned them, along with the conspirators. As not to aggravate things further, we made a basic post stating they’d been banned. Which of course that led to questions, we got other people mad at us. We knew they still had supporters inside the board, but if you cut off the head of the snake…. or so the saying goes.

Now do the ends justify the means? No. I still regret having to do that. As an admin, current and former, it hurt to cross that line. I’m reminded of that each time I go to moderate something. But I do believe it was necessary.

So a couple things happened. The vulgar troll went into overdrive on ANB and Gonzo… once again ignoring me. I was the nice admin of course… He was hot under the collar about the bannings. Good for him, hope he had hemorrhoids like golf balls. I got messaged about the bannings directly. Why was this done?… playing innocent again. I responded back in a coyly written response that they knew what they’d been involved in. It’d been a long time coming. After that my hosting space with that person was wiped out without notice, not surprising, but it was a bit of an inconvenience when banners for the PWCF became broken. After that little coy reply, the troll started hammering on me as much and sometimes even more than everyone else. I was the liar and backstabber. Coincidence… I think not.

The other thing that happened, as was to be expected, was the board slowed down. A couple people I sent notes to, saying hey, it’s ok to come back now, we’ve gotten rid of them finally. We did see some folks return. It wasn’t enough though, too little too late.

So for the final death blow…

Shortly after the banning, InvisionPlus that hosted AFC and PWCF, began to have issues. This was in the form of going offline for a week, other outages. Generally they got resolved. Well about the third time it didn’t come back.

Speaking from a future perspective, what the problem was is that IP+ was owned by one guy. Back when I started on it he had paid helpers the manage things when he was off doing something else. Somewhere in all this he switched to all volunteer support people, and gave no one the power to actually do anything but be yes men. So he left to go skiing and have a vacation at a cabin in the mountains, and the whole system went to ash, you had the IP+ support board flooded with paying and free customers complaining up a storm. But the volunteer people couldn’t reach the guy, nor could they do anything about it.

Long story sort I tracked the guy down. Gave the staff the run down on everything the web had to offer. They managed to contact him, he came in about a week later (this being like a month offline already) and had to do disaster control. AFC and PWCF were offline totally. My plans at that time, to merge Kin and PWCF were stuck. So the boards came back online, but you had to go through a very annoying captcha login before even getting to the forum – and that was really iffy on if it ever would work.

We were assured the captacha was temporary, but it was permanent. I made many requests asking for the database for AFC and PWCF, which were submitted by the support staff, but never materialized.

But the damage had been done. People didn’t want to go to the AFC any more. Those that did, didn’t know when it’d be online at any given time. The captcha became impossible to get through. One of the times it did work, I went through PWCF and saved every post by hand. I went to AFC and saved some of the translation section. There weren’t too many posts really worth saving from the rest of it.

So our hands were tied, we couldn’t fix anything. We were locked out once again like had been the case with DualFans originally. Frankly us three admins of the AFC were half sick of the whole affair, and half relieved it was taken from us. We touched base a couple times after the crash but generally didn’t stay in contact too much. We were tired and wanted to get on with something else in our lives.

Well AFC died there, but the old Yuku board is still online ironically. Tenchiboard from what I heard had it’s own problems with trolls taking over the place. Ayeka.net I learned later on started up as a AFC alternative, but I had no interest in being there as some of the AFC trolls relocated there after they were banned. Sanctuary always was just itself, no more no less. Kind of like being stuck in a time warp, it’s not changed a bit over the years. Seto’s Fan got hit by the spam bots, no one ever fixed it.

ANB bless him, is still dealing with that psychotic nutcase to this day. He still is stalking him around his blog and who knows where else.

As for PWCF, it died there as well. But as we were stuck by InvisionPlus and I was about to hang up my hat, Kazuki came out of the blue and was ready to make a new DualFans and a new forum for it. Within a few hours we had a new phpBB running. From there we asked who we could of the PWCF and Kin members to move there. I tried setting up sections for Tenchi and Saint Knight Story (ISM) in hopes that some of the good people would float by our board. Setup another translation section again. We never were able to get backups of any other forum, so the merge never happened. Our biggest problem was just not having many members to talk with.

So Kiyoka… or dragonami as she used to go by back in the day… eventually pestered me over IM enough to get me to register at TenchiForum… and here I be. This part of “history” you can see for yourself and pass your own judgments.

With what I’ve been through, want my suggestions for a better life?

Find your faith in God. Study the Word. Treat others as you would have done unto you.

I know I’m not perfect, can’t get there either, but doesn’t mean I always want to be as I am either.

Pick your friends and associates wisely, for they will mold you over time.

Build on your creative and unique skills, to the point they can be sold.

Try to relax, have fun while you’re young. The trials of adulthood will be hard and come fast enough.

Exercise, you only have this one body for the time being… least until we get nanobots.

Never stop learning, or trying to learn more, ever.

When it comes to matters of the heart and love, be honest with yourself and to others.

Inspect your emotions: love, lust, and infatuation are not the same things.

Buy Sunscreen (inside joke)

Never accept defeat, unless you can learn from it and always be friendly about it.

Don’t go to bed with anger between you and someone close to you, resolve it.

Don’t use free web or forum hosting… it always ends in tears. ~_^