TheHelper Site History - 1st Official Blizzard Battle.net Forums MVP Story

I have really enjoyed reading the history :) Keep it up and keep em coming!!
 
The Great Crash (NEW)

The site was blowing up! We had just got the Tutorials area up and the World Editor Forums were Rocking! This was in 2006!

Bam!!!! The site went down. A total crash at the provider level. The server we were on lost its hard drive. We had some old plan. I had an old server. Nobody paid attention to that in those days because the people that set up were not active and the host just got forgotten about.

We lost a years worth of forum data.

We were down for at least a month if not more.

I personally cannot believe we survived it.

Thanks to everyone who got us back up! You guys know who you are and you saved us!

The good news is I am told by my Server Admin that the chances of that happening again are 0% I feel better about it now but back then it was a Killer.

I had totally forgotten about this event. I was going over the old days in my memory and ran across this little gem and posted about it and was enlightened. I remember alot about this now and it had a profound effect on the site.

To be continued....
 
Darg (Co-Founder World Editor Help Forums)

I have resisted writing this section for the longest. This is like in 2004-2005. When we finally got it all together we had the Big Crash but that was after the Origin.

I wish I could get an origin of the World Editor Help forums from Wargasm or Darg because they are the ones that started it. I am real fuzzy on the order of events on this as it was a long time ago. I lost all my notes on this so I am going from memory alone. I was not even active on the forums. I was a lurker, looking at stats and stuff from a real high level but other than posting some news every now and again I was totally absent from the site.

Warcraft 2 BNE was just a drip in the bucket and no new mapping stuff was there. Just Battle.net. When Warcraft 3 came out Wargy and Darg started the World Editor Help Forum. It blew up. Wargy did not play Warcraft 3 and it was Darg's baby.

I started noticing a huge amount of posts in the World Editor Help Forum. I came in to get an update on what was up and found out a little community had popped up there. Apparently Blizzard's new Map Development tool was a hit and we were number one on the search engines for help on that...

I had came in about 3 months after the forums started becoming active so we had a ton of content in our forums on help issues in the search engines and the things I was doing to promote the site were working. SDRyoko was working on his famous Tower Defense and was all up active in the forums. The whole time writing tutorials in the background on his editor work....

It was Darg, Ryoko and a newcomer called Acehart. We also had a lot more but I have to get with some of the other members to remember their names.

Then the Great Crash Happened.

to be continued.....

Shout out to Darg! Thanks for all your help my friend! Your contributions to the site are not forgotten! I look forward to seeing you again! Or at least really seeing you once.
 
1. Use WayBack Machine to look up threads from before crash.
2. Manually re-insert said threads into database.
3. ???
4. Profit!
 
It just happened at a real bad time. We had lots of new members and we were the trailblazers. When we went down not everyone came back. Not nearly.
 
LOL, I'M A SECTION!

Can't. Wait.

Best. Chapter. Evah.
 
Special Membership

So I was intrigued by the new TheHelper.net. This VBulletin system was interesting and had lots of stats. I started seeing a bunch of the same people on the site and started reading the VBulletin site logs to see memberships. I started to notice a pattern.

Most of the people on the site posted one or two times. These were the question askers. We did not even make you have to register to post back in these days. We were the Kings of the 1 post wonders. Watching the graphs though you saw the members who stayed online, the ones who registered with the forums and those that had large rep increases. It was the statistical profile of a helper.

I decided to create a special group for The Helpers I noticed in the stats. 100 Rep was the criteria. The Special Members Forum was born.

This was the Best of our Best! The Helpers! The basis of the site for many years to come.

Though we do not have the same kind of membership level as that anymore at 100 Rep we have brought back the Special Members forum. It is a tribute to the past. We do recognize people that manage to get 100+ rep here. For all of you that did not get a message or something from me thanking you for helping at that level - THANK YOU! You guys and gals are what this site is all about! The Helpers!

Now, anybody who gets more than 100 rep gets access to the Special Members forum and the User Title underneath your name becomes customizeable. This is all automated now on my side thank you TheHelper.net Admins. Back in the day I used to PM everyone when that happened and upgrade everybody myself. It was a big manual process that thank goodness does not have to be done today.

Ultimately, the first incarnation of the Special Membership went down in flames, I expected way too much from that group of people and there were just a whole lot of them in the end. A bunch of people that did not really give a crap because my initial stat analysis was not done on a large enough group. The popularity of the World Editor Forum and WET flooded the forum with everyone because of my stupid 100 rep limit. It messed up all my stats and it all crumbled down because I was not able to adjust. We had to close it down. We were infected with dumbasses and it was all my fault!

The original Special Members though, that was a different story. I think we had like 20 to start or something.

sqrage
conan
kc
alexander/seth
rinpun
bartuc
silverhawk
agentpaper
darthfett

To Be Continued.....
 
> We were infected with dumbasses!

"Were"? What's this "were" business here? :p
 
To embelish a lil history... Because, you know >.> I was thurr, man.

The first group was the trifecta of XXXconanXXX, Rinpun and Alexander. XXXconanXXX was a known WEHZ member from his AoS style map that was probably one of the most "successful" maps that wasn't created by an Adiminstrator, "A World Ablaze" or AWA. Rinpun was creating some king of LoaP game and Alexander was relatively new to the entire world of map making. In his lifetime here on TH.net, I think he made maybe... 2? Maps that really gained any kind of repute; An AoS style map done on a Tiny map size which I can't remember the name of and a map of regular make, but enhanced with additional units and features. He called this an "Enhanced Melee Map" and it went through several updates before he retired from mapping in general.

Over the years, we would see a number of ideas that gained some kind of attention, including the game "The Evil Within", a Dark Deeds-style map that is probably still one of the biggest threads in the Member's Projects forum. However, while the ideas were well received, there was little actual work done on the map and eventually, Alexander let the map slip away yet again.

Alexander would remain, however, aiding many other members with pushing a new topic into TH.net; Writing. Being one of the main posters in a thread that was entitled "The Writer's Corner", this single thread eventually helped motivate an entire forum that still exists today. You guessed it... "The Writer's Corner". He would flood the forum with a number of his own stories, including the manuscript of his first novel... "Corruption", a Vampire story that his Tiny AoS was based upon.

Under Alexander and a number of other enthusiastic members, TH.net would see Role-Playing come and go, inspiring a number of the players to span out and create their own RP sites.

Not everything about Alexander was the greatest of times, as he dealt with a number of personal issues; Secret flame wars with XXXconanXXX and even a personal rivalry with SD_Ryoko that once resulted in him getting banned from the site for 3 days for stepping over the lines. Somehow or another, these things didn't keep him from become a moderator and later an Administrator on the site before the forum leaders were reworked to only include members actually willing/capable of working on the servers/forum software with a level of experience and professionalism.

And now he's back. An Administrator again, working on poking and prodding through the site to increase it's security and profeciency.

Oh, hey. Did I ever tell you I wasn't always "Seth Cross" on this site?

They used to call me Alexander :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Alexander was one of the original Special Members back in was even the root of a site split! A failed Site Split.

It was quite pitiful. They created a site and it just Failed! They all came back. That happened like twice :)

This was a creative group of guys and Alexander was the leader.

After a bunch of BS and a few years Alexander grew up. You have to understand that he was like 13 when he got on the forums.....

At like 17 Alexander/Seth was an Admin. We have the Writers Corner and general peace in the forums from this.

Seth was the hammer. He would go where no mod wanted to go. He did not care. He took care of business. If someone needed a banning, Seth was the one. A natural leader Seth is now in the Military and will probably disappear out of site pretty soon as many of the other Moderators that have joined the military have (Dr Jack, sqrage, etc...).

Thank you Seth for your dedication and leadership on the Site!
 
You were not here back then Ghan. You came later my friend. Can't you read the main chart page man? :)
 
tom_mai78101 said:
I didn't know the Table of Contents (first page, OP) were placed chronologically.
Click to expand...

I have tried to keep the Table of Contents chronologically but some stuff is out of order to my fading memory. I try to fix stuff as I see it.
 
Yeah, My original accout was taken out in the crash.

I didn't come back for a while after the crash too.

I also don't think anyone would know my original account name :>
 
Blizzard Spotlight Maps

Once upon a time Blizzard decided it wanted to support the Map Development more in WC3. They started a Tutorials and help site that linked heavily to TheHelper.net.

They started a program called Blizzard Spotlight Maps where they picked the best maps from the user development community a week and recommended them on their page. Getting linked by Blizzard was a real big deal back then.

SDRyoko and 56K were the first two recipients of those awards :)

To be continued....
 
Aw...

I'm gonna cry :D
 
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    Or even third party. Like if you don't have an original one in a functional condition, you cannot play this game properly. Like yeah the keyboard mods exist, but I think those are BARELY functional
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    And since almost all of my programming experience is with defunct shit now, I figure my best place is helping preserve legacy stuff. Which I don't know how to do necessarily, but I need some kind of a hobby and figuring out how older things worked is the only shit that really interests me. Well soldering and restoration is fun too, but no one is bringing me new stuff to fix and restore, so it's mostly old shit, and I LOVE OG Xbox so much. I want to make sure it can function as long as possible, until someone can effectively emulate it at least. I have like 15 I was going to fix over the winter and didn't get to.
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    We have some elderly guests that regularly come hang out at the bar at the end of the night, and every once in a while we don't see someone for a few weeks and then someone shows up with their obituary.
  • Varine Varine:
    We usually let them do their memorials there in the morning if they want to and I'll make them some snacks and drinks. There was one guy named Tom that came in like every night and would sit by himself and get a bunch of soup and a glass of wine. idk why but he LOVED our fucking soup, like he would order a fucking quart of it at a time and would always get so sad when we stop doing it for the summer.
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  • Varine Varine:
    But he also loved our calamari, which is another thing I hate but it sells super well so I can't change it. There was one day he came in and was asking me how to make it, because he tried to at home once in the off season when we stop running it and he really wanted it lol
  • Varine Varine:
    I think he's one of the only people I've made recipes for for free because he really wanted a broccoli cheddar, and it was like dude I don't have a recipe, it's just whatever I have, but here, this is how you do it
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    I don't think he ever figured out how to do the calamari in a pan though, like idk how to do that either. He was afraid of the at home deep fryers though and it's like yeah, that's fair, I am too
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    He was just such a sweet old man, we had two servers pregnant and they held a baby shower together, he was soooooo fucking excited to get to see a baby. Unfortunately he died a month or so before they were born
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    So I decided to Google some people that I had not seen or heard from in a while and sure enough one of my old best friends, we had a falling out years ago but whatever, find out he died of Pancreatic Cancer in January. I have also lost a few of my closer acquaintances from growing up the last year. Getting old - people die - I kinda thought it was going to be this way a few years ago....
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  • The Helper The Helper:
    Forum running super slow again
  • Ghan Ghan:
    Not really clear from the stats as to what is causing the slowness.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    We get a lot of guest traffic so it may just be the load is getting too high and not from any particular source.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    Looks like the server is maxed out on CPU.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    Oh it looks like a lot of the traffic is Silkroad Forums. That domain isn't protected by Cloudflare.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    But the old Silkroad site is still on its own server. I just had a test site set up on this server for it.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    I just disabled that test site. Let's see if that helps the load.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    Looks much better already.
  • The Helper The Helper:
    I had actually forgot about the Silkroad site. I had asked
  • The Helper The Helper:
    SD Ryoko about it and he said the couple of people left on there really like it, that was a few years ago, maybe I should check back
  • jonas jonas:
    I guess when you're getting old, and the last day of soup season draws near, you start wondering
  • jonas jonas:
    will I make it to the start of the next season? or was this the last time I'll ever have my favorite dish?

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