CitizensCoup.net is a great gaming forum.
Title
Citizen's Coup Network
Description
Web design is always something I took a bit of a shinning too, for quite a long time. I’ve built a lot of personal websites with the intent of this and that. I don’t really know what gave me the first inclination to start one. There’s always been an interest in creative writing, art, and computers. Web design just seemed to capture all that and lump it into one little happy ball. The Citizens Coup Network is coming up on its three year mark here and it kind of got me thinking where it all started. CCN started long before it donned the name you now know it as and it’s been a persistent project of mine since I typed my first HTML tag into notepad…
I would have to say it all started sophomore year of high school. Flash was just coming on to the scene and still owned by Macromedia, later gobbled up by media giant Adobe. I jumped into a brand new web design class at my high school which was a complete joke. Our high school had a habit of boasting a cutting edge educational curriculum so we’d look good on paper but never bothering to train or hire the faculty in that specific discipline. I got a D- in the class and spent the majority of the time screwing around reading Ultima Online blogs, tormenting my classmates who were actually working, and circumventing the school security.
Over the course of the class I landed myself a two day suspension for having pornography on my computer. I had broken my teachers administrator account and used to it to commandeer my friend’s computer remotely and play porn on his screen as a joke. Needless to say I forgot to delete the one file. Playing cyber sleuth my teacher wiggled past all the programs that could have very well landed me jail time and found boobs. I ended up getting suspended for the most harmless thing on the computer. Later I used his account to tank our second campus’s library computers because I was late on an American History project and needed to buy time.
My first website spawn from little exploits like this and focused on little security circumvention tricks I picked up at school to hopefully aid other deviants. It was programmed in notepad because I didn’t know any better. I made use of the now defunct GeoCities free web hosting. The page was an absolute mess, I barely knew what I was doing and it was quite simply called “Violent Dave’s Rants”. If you could see past the advertisements and quite obviously stolen graphics you’d be subject to copious amounts of teen angst and MacGyver style trouble making tidbits. I saw a couple dozen hits a month and for the most part it would be people I knew and pushed towards the site.
That site ran for a while until I got a redesign bug under my skin and a bit more talent in the graphic design department. After quite a bit of tinkering and amateurish graphic development I produced a site called “Playing by Power Lines”. The site made use of, for the first time, original Flash movies and site graphics. All of the content from the rants page was ported over and I took on some friends as guest bloggers. The site saw some decent traffic, for what it was, pulling in a grand total of a couple thousand hits a year but was still on a free host and inundated with cheesy ads and no domain name. It was a little hard to get links and be taken remotely seriously by other web masters without some sort of officiating status. Web domains and hosting at that point in time weren’t exactly cheap as they were now so we were considerably hindered.
Playing by Power Lines continued after high school until some real life predicaments forced its closure. Quite a bit of time passed and I eventually enlisted in the military and was otherwise preoccupied online with playing a game called Ultima Online on a free server. Eventually the free server ran its course and closed its doors yet the forums remained open for the player community. At that time I started writing about my experience on the free shard in the form of a player autobiography chronicling my time the game. Through a friend in the Navy I got some free hosting and I purchased the domain name citizenscoup.net.
Taking a page from another gaming site I had frequently I installed a content management system. In layman’s terms a CMS is a dynamic site structure that comes packaged with quick and easy tools for site management. I posted my autobiography chapter by chapter as I wrote the articles but the web was quite a different place. Traffic barely trickled in despite the fact that I had a better site, better graphics, more knowledge, and better content. The popularity of the internet skyrocketed since I was last a site owner and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook were growing. Owning a website wasn’t anything real special or novel anymore.
Unfortunately the free hosting dried up when my friends company, an Everquest II gold resale site, went under thanks to some legal pressure from Sony. Still being relatively broke and uninterested in paying for hosting at that point in time I jumped on board with an already existing site called Fromunda.net run by Tarzan and Bud Weiser. The site was utilizing an antiquated CMS so with Bud’s permission I pulled out the foundation and completely rebuilt the site from scratch. Creating a layout for the site was proving a little tough seeming that my knowledge of PHP was quite limited so for the most part we stuck our logo into already existing site layouts and made due with minor tweaks to the interface over time.
Bud fell off the face of the planet to go play World of Warcraft and Tarzan and I continued to hack at it for about a year. The forums from the Ultima Online free server closed its doors rather abruptly and we did our best to scoop in that community of gamers so we had a place to continue to congregate. The site lacked any real sort of direction or focus, our post frequency was relatively sporadic, but our user community grew slightly over time. The growth wasn’t anything really that special, the community was quite small and I can remember a time when I knew each and every member.
Another site I had been regularly visiting since back in those high school web design days was wtfman.com and they were running a contest to bring on more staff writers. I jumped on the opportunity and submitted an article. A voting thread cropped up to vote for popular writers and the community from fromunda.net voted my position up and around six months later I got an offer to write for them. Dual posting articles on both Fromunda and WTFMan, our collective sites continued to grow until we decided to fire up our own multiplayer Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas server.
Personally and professionally I had accumulated quite a bit of experience and technical knowledge in site management. The coding for the GTA server wasn’t all that dissimilar from C# and Flash Actionscript so it was pretty easy to pick up and run with. Combining the player base from the popular forums of Fromunda, WTFMan, Something Awful, and RunUO the GTA server drew a lot of new blood into the game and thus attracted a considerable amount of normal GTA players creating a highly popular server. Fromunda saw a huge spike in traffic and popularity which part lead to a dramatic emotional meltdown of Tarzan. I was forced to cut him out of the mix administration wise with the near disaster of losing a considerable amount of work.
I never did like the Fromunda branding the site had, it was kind of tough being taken seriously being named after the funk that accumulates on unwashed testicles so I purchased citizenscoup.net once again and forwarded the Fromunda.net traffic to the new domain and completely branded the site under the new flag. The site prospered under the new branding and the GTA server bounced off the ceiling becoming a world renowned multiplayer server. The GTA server suffered a hardware failure causing the loss of accounts. The ensuing drama caused by creative differences and my divided attention between the sites, Citizens Coup Network and WTFMan, association between the two sites and RunUO was dissolved.
Off on our own, CCN announced the reopening of the GTA server under new coding grossing its highest trafficked in a single day with over 5,200 page views. The server continued on drawing players to the site until its closure. After the closing of the GTA server the site underwent a redesign. Armed with the time to finally realize the image that I wanted for Citizens Coup, the site was revamped from a generic template to the grunge, retro-propaganda look you see today. I’ve always been a fan of psychologically contradicting visual imagery and the circa 1940 propaganda which now adorns the site.
The Citizens Coup Network continues to grow and evolve as I do, like a big perpetual ongoing project. The site idea itself has changed from its humble beginnings of a notepad coded site with pilfered graphics for the amusement of a handful of real life friends to a website that grossed 1.7 million hits in 2008, founded a world renowned game server, facilitated by a dedicated volunteer staff of international members, and thousands of forum threads by thousands of users.
Languages
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