Happy 20th Anniversary SW-Fans.Net / swvstitanic / TheHolo.net !!

[Darth Turbogeek]

In April of 1999 I followed a link on TheForce.Net to a site called JawaFortress, which had a box office challenge set up between Star Wars and Titanic. Among all that, there was also text-based roleplaying of a sort that started up. It's all hazy to me on what happened after that, but we went from JawaFortress to swfans to coruscantcity to swfans to holonet and here we are!

I thought you arrived at Jawafortress before roleplay started?

Late May, 1999 - Itala Marzullo, self-proclaimed Sith Master, begins a thread entitled "The Sith Council," in which people officially join the first major RP-related group on the board. In response, sirdizzy begins a thread entitled "The Jedi Council," founding the first Jedi group. In both groups, initial ranks are determined by knowledge of Star Wars and the number of times having seen the original films. Roleplay becomes more of an influence on the boards, as a rivalry and recruiting war between the groups builds.

How it developed from there was a lot of my work, for better or worse. And the reason why I decided to insert something more than *lights lightsabre and slashes at face* was a pretty silly reason - I wanted to outwrite Sith posters to gain an advantage in the developing warfield. Annnnnnd...... now you know why the FORCE WEDGY was born because I'm actually pretty sure the first post that I actually put some effort into was to wedgy the hell out of Marzullo as a way of saying "F*** you* because in all honesty Itala was an amazingly obnoxious person in all sorts of ways.

The WEDGY got so effective in roleplay that Sith specifically wrote they had no underwear or like Lady Vader, fought in the nude or bodypaint to stop it. And thinking of Lady Vader in bodypaint, she caught Turbogeek in a kitchen as was giving him a lot of trouble until I was a bit sleep deprived on the train working out what to do as my favorite ideas weren't working. Someone on the train was talking about teflon frying pans and that's when I had a lightbulb moment.


Late 1998/Early 1999 - jawafortress hosts a small message board dedicated to Episode I possible boxoffice. Debate ensues about it's chances to overtake Titanic as the #1 box office film of all-time.


Early 1999 (January or February) - Jason and friends found "SWFans.net", a website specificallly dedicated to fandom of Star Wars. The "Star Wars vs. Titanic" forums (hosted by EZBoard) at jawafortress become a part of this new site. Activity on the message board begins into increase as TPM release date approaches.

[CMJ]

I joined when it was still at Jawa Fortress. It was probably around the week TPM opened.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Hi CMJ!!

[CMJ]

LOL, hey there. Sorry I disappeared entirely for a couple of years (and was mostly gone for a couple of years before that). It happens. I do miss people from here.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

It's ok! It happens to everyone. What's important now is that you're here....





...and you can never leave again.

[Mandy with an I]

Wow this place is so old.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Mandi!!!

[Aurelias Kazaar]

I just kinda did in 1999/2000. Left in ‘03, came back whenever the reset happened, got busy with life and work...����*♂️

[Rutabaga]

20 years? Seriously? Gah, I'm such an old fart.

So according to my account, I registered here in September of 2001, but the first iteration of SWFans was on EZBoard, right? Because I'm sure I first started posting in 1999. But because I'm an old fart, I can't for the life of me remember just how I found the place. Oh, and my original handle was JinnFizz, if that makes any difference.

Lots of memories in this place. Lots and lots of memories, some really crappy, but most of them pretty good.

I know I haven't really been around for a couple of years, but here I am, saying happy anniversary, y'all.

[Mandy with an I]

I keep getting a zillion emails about my accounts, and the 20 year thing intrigued me!


Also I am bad at keeping in touch with people >_>;

[Lilaena De'Ville]

If you want some old accounts deleted, I can take care of that for you Mandi. I’m glad you stopped in!

You too, Rutabaga! I know we’re facebook friends but I’m happy to see you here, too.

[Mandy with an I]

It's not a big deal, haha. How is everyone? Whats going on with y'all?

[Atreyu]

I found Star Wars vs. Titanic (a subsection of Jawa Fortress) in late May 1999, via a banner link on another fan site I had been reading Star Wars news on. At the time the message board was some old, cheap, free service (didn't even have to register) that used the 'threaded' format that was still fairly in vogue at the time. I however spent more time in the chat room which resulted in myself being spoilt stupid concerning Episode 1 (it wasn't released in Australia until early June 1999).

Anyhow one night I was posting on the forum with a couple of others and a troll mass-spammed the board. Jason (the founder and owner) was also online but the message board didn't have the option to ban anyone so he migrated us that night to a new board software - ezboard. Unlike the earlier board however you had to register and I discovered my previous handle had already been taken for a Global Account (ezboard had 2 types of registration - Global and Local - the former allowing access across the entire ezboard network whilst the latter only allowed access to the particular board you registered on) so I instead registered 'Darth Jasper' (I think I got the Jasper name from a book). Naturally I continued posting and partaking in the discussion and soon joined the fledgling 'Jedi Council' that sirdizzy established as a lowly padawan. Somewhere around this time Jason renamed his website to 'SWFans.Net' and the message board followed suit. You can still find a screenshot of the old site here.

My family went to Central Australia shortly afterwards so I was absent for about 2 weeks. When I came back I found the board almsot deserted - there had been a revolution and now a new Star Wars board had been setup which nearly everyone had moved to (later to be known as CoruscantCity.Net). I posted a bit there however a few people were still hanging around the old SWFans board, including people like CMJ, jjwr, obiwan2 etc. The thing is that whilst all the regular SW posters had gone the hosted Replica Props section was still super-active so the SWFans ezboard was still turning up at the top of Star Wars searches on ezboard, which meant there were still people arriving and posting so we started to build the community back up slowly. However we still had trolling issues and with no active mods/admins we kept appealing to Jason to do something which eventually saw myself, CMJ and jjwr made mods (and eventually admins) of the board.

So we've got a little community now going and we're posting in a forum called 'Jedi vs. Sith'. The Jedi Council (later Jedi Order) is going well but the Sith are still fairly small in number. A new Sith Council (not affiliated with Itala's earlier group) got going led intially by Darth Sidious and later Darth Fenris, with assistance form other posters such as Bromine and Mara Jade1 (later Lady Mara Jade), which eventually took on the name of the Sith Empire. After a while a 3rd was setup called BSK (turns out it stood for Beer, Sex and Killing - things were pretty laid back in those days). Our ranking system had switched from number of Episode 1 viewings to one based on number of posts (which I kept changing every week).

In this time some of us were also posting over at CoruscantCity.Net and some of thir posters were returning the favour, notably people like Darth Turbogeek, Figrin D'an and Master Yogurt. Turns out that Itala had moved his Sith Council onto his own ezboard (the first of it's kind I believe) and the Jedi were left with not much to do so they started coming back over to SWFans to find a slowly growing Sith Empire here to deal with. The CoruscantCity.Net Jedi had also followed Itala's exampled and setup their own private board for Jedi and the SWFans Jedi were invited to visit as well. At about this time the whole 'infiltration' craze got going where Jedi and Sith attempted to hack into each other's boards (I remember Figrin and Turbogeek were quie successful in infiltrating Itala's group - I got busted within a day LOL) - we took it all so super-serious at the time but it seems all amusing now. I think the ultimate act was pulled off by AmazonBabe who successfully roleplayed as both herself and Lady Vader for a couple of years before anyone figured it out.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that Charley (or 'The Lounge Lizard' as he was then known) was also hanging around here somewhere but I can't remember his exact involvement, maybe he can fill in.

Roleplaying at this time started to become a bit more developed. A lot of earlier threads were plain 'fight' threads with imaginative titles such as 'The Battle Rages' and 'Jedi A vs. Sith B' etc. On the SWFans end we had also tried other random ideas earlier like having maps etc, but it was jjwr using his old D&D knowledge that really got the current setup going. He initially tried to run it as a DM with different threads representing different locations and an OOC thread to keep it all organised, however it quickly took a life of it's own with everyone just posting to a single thread ('The Grasslands') and the DM kind of getting left behind.

With all this happening I ended up emailing Darth Turbogeek privately suggesting we should join the 2 Jedi groups but it didn't take immediately, however after another month or so we finally merged and formed the Greater Jedi Order in November 1999 (I think I may have made up the name but not fully certain being so long ago).

So from there things just further developed. BSK folded by years end as the handful of roleplayers there moved on. The Sith Empire also followed the example of the others in setting up it's own board and of course eventually go it's own way. The Sith Council had it's own revolution that attempted to kick Itala out however the other admin of the board (Darth Bane) swooped in and granted Itala his admin access again so the roleplayers left and founded The Sith Order. Another Sith group in the Rogue Sith Order also estabished itself, plus an Imperial group. Attempts were made at having a New Republic group (firstly with the New Republic Central Command) but it didn't fully take and ended up setting up as a sub-forum on the Greater Jedi Order's message board. And countless other groups have come and gone. Go check out the wiki where some of them are still remembered.

Random stuff:
* As far as I can tell this is the oldest thread we have on the board, dated to July 1999 (it looks like an old trivia thread which we tended to do at the time).
* Also here is the earliest thread I can find with us attempting to record our board history, it's dated July 2000 (yes, our first attempt at recording our history was the result of a debate about whether to allow the polls feature - just keep reading the good stuff is down a bit lower, plus some familiar faces ).
* In the early days we used HTML tables for our signatures (ezboard wasn't using 'ezcode' at this time and allowed direct HTML to be used in posts). Many a thread would break because someone forgot to properly close off their table. Charley had an absolutely massive signature full of gifs and various phrases, most related to Dragonball Z. And Darth Turbogeek had his large scrolling signature which could slow the thread loading to a crawl. Don't ask about all the animated lightsabers we were rocking.

Cheers to 20 years guys and thanks for all the good times.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Hey there, Mandi!! We're still all plugging along and passing the time ^_^ How are you doing??!

And dang, Atreyu. That's a heck of a start. I always love reading your accounts of those old days anyway, so you had me hook, line, and sinker from the first sentence.

[Droo]

I first stumbled upon the Ezboard for The Sith Council when I was searching for Sith lore stuff for tabletop roleplaying. I lingered and created my Gav Mortis account that day, June 13th, 2000. I started out with training threads, and lurking around the Sith Council forums for a while, taking part in the Sith luau, and other sinister Dark Sider activities. In no time at all, I found the swvstitanic board, which was a bit like graduating from swimming in a lake to swimming in an ocean. Swept up in the chaos, I'm quite convinced my first roleplaying post there was in the Death Star: Part 3 thread, in which Gav and Garrett turned up in our own Eclipse and Sovereign-class Super Star Destroyers. As you do.

Hello to faces old and new!

[CMJ]

Any commentary about the old Boxoffice forums is useless without discussing Jedi3167 (wasn't that it?), the king of conspiracy theories.

Also Jonathan Bowen.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Jonathan Bowen was JonathanLB, yes?

Because boy have I heard some stories.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

I first stumbled upon the Ezboard for The Sith Council when I was searching for Sith lore stuff for tabletop roleplaying. I lingered and created my Gav Mortis account that day, June 13th, 2000. I started out with training threads, and lurking around the Sith Council forums for a while, taking part in the Sith luau, and other sinister Dark Sider activities. In no time at all, I found the swvstitanic board, which was a bit like graduating from swimming in a lake to swimming in an ocean. Swept up in the chaos, I'm quite convinced my first roleplaying post there was in the Death Star: Part 3 thread, in which Gav and Garrett turned up in our own Eclipse and Sovereign-class Super Star Destroyers. As you do.

Hello to faces old and new!

Yes, I just read an old thread, the Coruscant destroying one, where you pop in and go “oh man I left my Eclipse ISD at home do I have time to get it” and Itala says, “Yes, that’s fine, you have time,” and you have to explain that you were joking.

And then you pulled one out of your back pocket anyway.

Edit: if it’s any consolation here’s my first post.

[Mandy with an I]

Hey there, Mandi!! We're still all plugging along and passing the time ^_^ How are you doing??!

And dang, Atreyu. That's a heck of a start. I always love reading your accounts of those old days anyway, so you had me hook, line, and sinker from the first sentence.

I'm doing really good. I've been working at a hardware store, while doing design work (mostly for wrestling!) as a side job. I have a boyfriend and a dog, but everything else is pretty much the same, hahaha. I'm mostly on twitter as far as social media is concerned.

I hope you and Charlie are doing well <3

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

We're doing well! Mostly it's the same-old same-old, hehe. We did Celebration this last weekend in Chicago, which was insanely fun ^_^