MFG 5.1 Anime & Manga Forums - View Single Post

**Ace** · 11-15-2007

Sharky started the main MFG site in 2001. It started out as a video game review site, hence the name. At some point along the way, he got interested in DBZ, and started to include some pages about it. That part of the site proved to be much more popular than the video game stuff, and so more and more got added. Sharky asked Dino to help with the writing side, and asked me to help with the layout and sysadmin stuff. These days Dino focuses mostly on the IRC stuff, Sharky mostly works on collecting images for the gallery, and I do most everything else.

Our image gallery in the beginning was terrible -- all hand-made pages. We added Image Folio at some point, which was great. When we finally grew out of it, I wrote a custom gallery software system, which we're still using today.

We didn't decide to add a forum until 2004. We started with phpBB, then moved to Invision (IPB), and finally to CS, where we are now.

Early versions of the site were written using Dreamweaver. When our host got bought out in 2005 and moved all of our servers to New Jersey without giving us any advance notice, we switched from Linux to Windows. The new gallery only runs on Windows. MFG is hosted on 3 dedicated servers in a "Tier 1" data facility in downtown San Jose, California (it's actually the same building that the old Linux servers were in, just a different hosting company). The IPB system got hacked a few times, so we decided to move away from it around the same time -- but because of the sudden server change, we didn't have time to migrate people's old posts. Between that and the change to the less-featureful CS, we had a big decline in activity.

Hopefully things will improve with the change to vBulletin. It uses PHP, but still on our Windows servers.

11-15-2007	#3 (permalink)
Ace Administrator Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Kami's Lookout Posts: 1,423 Rep Power: 200	Re: History of MFG...The Beginning. Sharky started the main MFG site in 2001. It started out as a video game review site, hence the name. At some point along the way, he got interested in DBZ, and started to include some pages about it. That part of the site proved to be much more popular than the video game stuff, and so more and more got added. Sharky asked Dino to help with the writing side, and asked me to help with the layout and sysadmin stuff. These days Dino focuses mostly on the IRC stuff, Sharky mostly works on collecting images for the gallery, and I do most everything else. Our image gallery in the beginning was terrible -- all hand-made pages. We added Image Folio at some point, which was great. When we finally grew out of it, I wrote a custom gallery software system, which we're still using today. We didn't decide to add a forum until 2004. We started with phpBB, then moved to Invision (IPB), and finally to CS, where we are now. Early versions of the site were written using Dreamweaver. When our host got bought out in 2005 and moved all of our servers to New Jersey without giving us any advance notice, we switched from Linux to Windows. The new gallery only runs on Windows. MFG is hosted on 3 dedicated servers in a "Tier 1" data facility in downtown San Jose, California (it's actually the same building that the old Linux servers were in, just a different hosting company). The IPB system got hacked a few times, so we decided to move away from it around the same time -- but because of the sudden server change, we didn't have time to migrate people's old posts. Between that and the change to the less-featureful CS, we had a big decline in activity. Hopefully things will improve with the change to vBulletin. It uses PHP, but still on our Windows servers.