Basically the title. Who made it? When? Who pays for this gig? Does anyone own it? Been searching for the answers, thinking there might be something somewhere about this but no success so far.

Mahz is the head honcho. The Guild just had its 10th anniversary so it's been here since 2007. I'll leave the other answers for someone who could better explain than I could.

Someone else is gonna load you up with a wall of text. I'm going to throw the TLDR.

Mahz decided to make a site(circ. 1407) 2007ish, made it with some old prefab platform (vBulletin? yep) and it grew. It grew the various forums you're seeing around, and for the most part, it was largely similar. In some ways it had more things, but it had a lot less custom stuff, and the UI, meh. Traditional. Depending on who you ask, those early days saw distinctly advanced gents that again, depending on who you ask, had their elitist core that lived in the advanced forum. The lines were much clearer then. High casual was not a term thrown around for every other roleplay that couldn't decide between casual and advanced. Spam forum became shit. Otherwise, life was good Except that stalker I managed to catch in the archive link. Heh.

Then Mahz missed a payment by, like, a day, and the host nuked it all. Blew it up, no backups, nothing. Thus began the days of Guildfall, when nobody had a bloody idea what was going on and panic set in. All was lost. Then we got this thing. It was pretty nice, and coming together fairly quickly. Wasn't perfect, nope, but a forum. First posts started popping up. Guild life returned, though many old roleplays had died for good. Some did continue, though how long or how well each of them continued is another matter. Spam lived it up a bit. Well, this shit did anyways. Same difference..

Guild life went on. Server errors here and there. At one point, the site died for two years. No, really. We had a glorious spambot war for a while, and this is the old fort that stands in testimony of the events. Life happened. Then you joined, and the guild was ushered into a new era of peace, prosperity, debauchery, and insanity.

@ArenaSnow

Well... huh. Interesting. So Mahz is big man upstairs of this place? How does he pay for this cheese?

Lots of sacrificed brownie money and a little adsense. Perhaps someone donates in the background, but to my knowledge, it's largely out of pocket with adsense pennies making it a little nicer to deal with.

@ArenaSnow

Sorta surprised there is no donation system set up.

It's funny how I literally imagined the scene when @ArenaSnow mentioned the Guildfall



>>When nobody had a bloody idea what was going on and panic set in. All was lost.
>>>many old roleplays had died for good

I'm glad the old bad days were gone though and many new roleplayers are joining in! so that's great.

^basically guildfall.

@ArenaSnow as long as we have someone like you-- always welcoming new members, helping here and there, we don't have to worry about another guildfall.

@Chasebloodcrest

Why did it happen exactly?

@Chasebloodcrest

Why did it happen exactly?

It's pretty simple. Mahz barely missed a payment for hosting, and the site was subsequently dumped from the host because of that.

This is really interesting.

At one point, the site died for two years. No, really.

What happened here? Some kind of error? Or did people collectively decide to ghost one another for two years?

This is really interesting.

<Snipped quote by ArenaSnow>
What happened here? Some kind of error? Or did people collectively decide to ghost one another for two years?

For a while, the site's time management was completely borked, and so for a while timestamps were looking very odd. Mahz eventually fixed it, and business continued as usual.

I assume it was a clock in the server that was completely skewed and the code used to display timestamps decided to go rogue and post completely illogical times, but I never became very familiar with guild code, so someone who has would better be able to tell you exactly what happened.

Until the server errors came back, but that's another story, and we seem to be past that time as well.