Broly

How did MFG begin? Did like 5 guys come together and say, let's make a site and forum, or what? I'm very curious.

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Numeros MFG
-Cinco-

Amerowolf

Nope, only three guys came together. Sharky, Ace, and Dino.
I'm waiting for Superior to reply. He has this story down pat.

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Ace

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.

Sharky

ehem.

The original MFG actually started in late 2000 if I remember correctly. I attached an image of the layout below.

It was the DBZGT section that started in 2001. July 28th 2001 to be exact. That part of the site was named "The Ultimate DragonBall Kingdom".

ehhh....

Dino: mIRC (if anything, I suppose)
Ace: coding, forum, ads
Sharky: "most everything else"

I guess I've been a bit sidetracked with trying to get enough images to break the record for the largest anime image gallery (so close!!).


Well the rest of what Ace said sounds right on to me. But I'll expand on it a little:

The original MFG Forum started on Jan/23/2004. We chose phpBB due to it's popularity and it's price (free). I believe the first member to join was named "Goku", and was our test account we used early on.

The original MFG site (both the video game stuff, and the later DBZGT pages) were made in Macromedia Dreamweaver. And for graphics we used it's sister program Macromedia Fireworks.

A few years later I switched to Adobe Photoshop. And then in 2005-ish made the big jump from Dreamweaver to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite. Allowing me to finally stop using the horrible piece of junk known as Dreamweaver.


I guess the beginning is what people want to know about more. Let's see.

Well Dino and I have basically been into video games since we were born -- so when all 3 of us decided we wanted to my a website together, we quickly thought of video games. The first thing we did was look for a domain name.

We must have tried 20+ different domain names before we found something we liked that was available. Short names like gamereviews were our first ideas, so of course they were already taken.

The name slowly evolved and got longer until we thought up myfavoritegames. It was available -- and we all liked it.

The idea was to review our (my) favorite video games that we owned; cuz who would want to review crappy games? I also remember this being around the time the PS2 came out.

Dino and I wrote the reviews under the name "Dingo" (which we for some reason thought was a cool fusion between the name "Dino and Sharky"). Then once we wrote the reviews Ace would link them into a new page on the website.

Attached Images

mfg2.jpg (96.9 KB, 69 views)

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Island of 1,000 Condiments

Dino + Sharky = Dingo?


Interesting. O_o

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Zer0

LOL

Wow thats an interesting MFG there.

So I understand why the switch to more Dragonball Z oriented material but why drop the reviews completely?

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Ace

Mostly because people just weren't interested in them -- there was too much competition, and they took too long to do right. The old reviews are actually still on the site. If you've ever read any of them, you'd know that wasn't our strong point.

I'm attaching a photo of the outside of the building and one of the racks in the datacenter where the servers are located.

Attached Images

	MFG Hosting 004 sm.jpg (82.5 KB, 33 views)
	MFG Hosting 014 sm.jpg (91.9 KB, 42 views)

Shirogetsu

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Punxx

Damn, you guys have come a hell of a long way. Like leaps and bounds and light years ahead of the original MFG. Good job.

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Goku

yeah that's pretty amazing stuff there...Its s rich culture on this site whether some people like to believe it or not.

This is the website archive site thats been posted many time before but why not.

All the stages of MFG can be found here,

http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.myfavoritegames.com

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Ace

This question has been asked-and-answered so many times, we should make a FAQ page or a sticky for it or something.

Broly

Thanks for all the explanations and stuff. I appreciate the feedback.

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Numeros MFG
-Cinco-

Raven

Wow, I never saw that stuff. Pretty amazing if you ask me. I lol'ed when I first looked at the original mfg site image. Man, long way came we have.

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Official Anime Collection: Cowboy Bebop The Movie + DVD's 1 - 5 (Remix), Fullmetal Alchemist Season 1 Part 1, Patlabor, Samurai X, Wolf's Rain complete collection, Azumanga Daioh, Serial Experiments Lain, Howl's Moving Castle, Kurau, Weiss Kreuz Gluhen, Kino's Journey, Magical Shopping Arcade: Abenobashi, Gundam Wing complete collection + Endless Waltz, Wolf Brigade, Appleseed, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Tokyo Godfathers.

Wild-Roze

hmm, groovy history lesson. man.. so many admins and mods on one page.. the combination of greens blues and reds is starting to spin me out. :P

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Gangsta SabZ

^ Yeah, and now we know who the mods actually are!

Yeah, MFG goes way back. That's what makes it so good, it has a whole lot of history. 2005 was qulaity.