Prologue

The Helper

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Prologue

I started this site back in the late 1990's on Geocities - the first url was geocities.com/siliconvalley/lab/4614. I was up on a weekend having late night cocktails and decided to make my own website. I wish I had a screen capture of it.

The second URL of the site was geocities.com/~thehelper/ I was on a special Geocities upgraded account that served me well until I needed my own forums.

We have been around over 15 years. The site started as a personal website type of experiment but since I was posting so much in the Blizzard Tech Forums I started using it as a signature. I really did not try to do anything with it for a while as I learned how to design web pages and make every newbie mistake :)

I was answering the same questions over and over in the Blizzard Tech Forums, and Blizzard was not adding to their FAQ so I decided to copypasta a couple pages of my answers from the Blizzard Forum and made a FAQ that was completely addendum to Blizzard - stuff they did not cover.

By that time I had learned about web stats and was able to track all the traffic from every one of my Blizzard Tech Support Forum posts. I posted so much, many times answering all the questions and my name would be seen for pages. When I got the MVP it seemed like the forum glowed with a sea of thehelper and red mvp. Before MVP, every post in that forum at least one person clicked on it. After I got the MVP, those site visits multiplied geometrically.

That is one of the main reasons I got so interested in web stats and got into Search Engine Optimization. I was constantly watching the hit tracking logs looking for trends when I was not answering questions or working on the site.

There is a great story behind the early history of this site and the MVP days. The other first MVPs, t'kron - RIP, Dinobot and the ending of the first MVP program. Then the beginning of a new one, then another....

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