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| The History of the Golden Sun Community | |
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| Topic Started: May 9 2015, 08:38 AM (1,303 Views) | |
| Zeige | May 9 2015, 08:38 AM Post #1 |
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Part-Time Weeb
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So, I was searching the forums for random little things when I came across a name drop of a person in the Golden Sun community that I know. It involved the wiki and was about the fandom pages or something. I ended up looking at the Golden Sunrise page on there and I read something about this member known as Black Knight. So again, I do some searching and from there, I kept finding tiny chunks of history that became smaller and smaller as I went further. Eventually, this forum itself became a puzzle piece of the history of the Golden Sun community in its entirety. It was then that my curiosity overwhelmed me. So my question, has anyone ever chronicled the history of the Golden Sun fandom? I joined the community back in like, December of 2010, during the Great Dark Dawn Wave of Golden Sun Realm, so my knowledge before that is very limited. I know a couple things about this hacker group known as the dutch crew(?) that hacked GSR way back when and I also know a couple people like Cinder and The Sea King, but mainly by name. I was around for most things that involved GSR and everything that involved Golden Sun Unity afterwards but again, that's about it. So what's the history of this forum? Of GSR? GSAR? GSS? ToK? TLW? Edited by Zeige, May 9 2015, 08:42 AM.
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| Miva | May 9 2015, 09:13 AM Post #2 |
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Haha, you don't know the can of worms you're opening XD I'll give you a brief run down of my knowledge, but people like Sagie and Silva predate me and will be able to give you a better idea. Before my time there was GSR run by cinder and it had two forums: GSR and Golden Twilight. GT was hosted on forumplanet on the Gamespy network. Cinder abandoned (?) GT and stuff? I joined in maybe 2005 or 2006, things had already become less awesome by then apparently. I don't remember the time well; between then and 2007, but Ichiro was in charge? And BK was around and kind of ruined everything for everyone. There were mods that were pretty horrible, like I remember decoy edited one of my posts where I'd post a picture of myself to say that I had slept with the guy that was in the picture and I was pretty annoyed. Anyway I don't really remember the details very well, but BK got us kicked off of forum planet. Many of us moved here (well it was an invisionfree forum then) and that's when I was made mod, I'd originally just wanted to be mod of the RP section since I was trying to run a GS RP called 'The Group', but they just made me global. During that time Silva, Tuskasa and Sagie were admins, Cruel Ruin as another mod (I think that was it for the team?). Things were cool at first, we rebanded to Sunrise since it was a new more optimistic time. Trouble was that was some time after GS1&2 by then and being on invisionfree makes it hard to get members. Sagie left and I was made admin, but things were ever in decline, we had no way to make our presence known and virtually never got new members. I knew Sea King around that time, I did some work trying to make us affiliate with other forums, Sea King was really nice and helpful. He set us up with website on his server which Cipher was designing. When DD came out we were all excited and declared that everything was uphill from there. Cruel Ruin got us a place on his friends server and we left invisionfree. Me, Cruel and Silva were admins and Diego was a moderator. We didn't really get a serge of membership though and all of the projects we were working never really came to anything. I left around 2011/2012 I think and things were pretty dead by then. In early 2013 the website was down, though it was over long before that. This place had been around the whole time though, the 'last person to post' topic had been sporadically posted in when old members remembered to go back and post in it, ever stubborn. In 2014 Diem (my bf) decided to stalk past me since I mentioned that I'd talked about him here, that brought me back and I decided to see if we could have a reunion and here we are over a year later, the place more lively than it had ever been during my time on the team, no idea how it happened. That is to say: a brief run down of Sunrise history. I know only a little about other histories. Edited by Miva, May 9 2015, 09:29 AM.
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| Nikki | May 9 2015, 09:33 AM Post #3 |
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Omniheurist
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Thank you for writing and sharing all this, Miva. It is very interesting, though, as alawys, I am mostly thinking that this may prove very useful in the scavenger hunts
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| Miva | May 9 2015, 10:18 AM Post #4 |
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I went back and had a look at some of the stuff for "The Group": http://s7.zetaboards.com/GoldenSunrise/topic/1075641/1/ All the pictures on the topic are long gone, but I found them on my pc: http://imgur.com/AvdKsrb,AcYumBQ,mWSOmxY,FR6k0d2,sVZkNuA,V23Irr3,uACFhbc,TYb3rV6 Man some of this stuff is kinda embarrassing XD I put a lot of work into it. As I remember nothing really came of it, as with most things that we tried to do back then. |
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| Diego, the mentor | May 9 2015, 05:33 PM Post #5 |
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Brain wave reader
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I´m amazed of how did I always miss all the drama that happened, for some reason I was never around whenever someone tried to attack the forums good, no one suspects a thing yet... |
| Clara, be my pal... tell me. Am I a good man? | |
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| Zeige | May 9 2015, 06:28 PM Post #6 |
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Part-Time Weeb
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Hmm... I'm on to you and your schemes, Diego >__> Anyway, thanks for sharing Miva. Interesting stuff. I'm glad things eventually did work out in terms of activity on this forum and all the projects going on. While I was on GSR, Cinder was a very... enigmatic haha, or at least from my perspective. She really only made board announcements and was around on the IRC IIRC. But abandoned sounds like a harsh word, was there some sort of falling out way back then? And was Black Knight your run-of-the-mill troll or something far more nefarious, like a hacker of sorts? Or was the moderation under folks like Decoy the reason he was able to do whatever he wanted to do? |
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| cipher | May 9 2015, 06:32 PM Post #7 |
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Fancy Chicken
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Black Night was no hacker, more of a troll. Mostly was a friendly funny dude, but he liked to mess with people. Him and a few other "bad eggs" so to speak took it too far multiple times via spamming boards, getting people's account info and using them, deleting boards etc. Generally griefing the mods and admins.
Edited by cipher, May 9 2015, 06:33 PM.
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| Silva | May 10 2015, 09:00 AM Post #8 |
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Fiercer than the Dark
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Yeah I think I can fill in / add to that early period a bit. And to Sagie: please and if you want, feel free to correct me if I mistake any of this, it's just from memory only at this point. Cinder made GT as a kind of separate community extension of GSR's website and it was a very popular, active forum for a good time, benefiting from the massive community of Forumplanet in general. As things settled slightly (but new members were still constantly coming in as Golden Sun was recent), certain personalities became the known regulars and became well associated with each other, including online romance and MSN contact and eventually developing into playing some online games together. A certain happy season in that time was called the "Golden Summer" afterwards by those regulars, when people were especially positive and optimistic, certain famous threads Sagie, Formi and I can't forget were made, and the community was at its most harmonious. However, as time passed, certain well known individuals begun to leave for real life/unknown reasons and drama and sadness started to develop. Cinder left as you said. Sagie might be most qualified to speak about Cinder's reasons for that. I came into the picture only a little before Cinder left, so my memory and understanding only comes from hearing others talk about the stuff above. I've researched it more than I might have otherwise, thanks to my book in the works, of course. Anyway, you're right, the mod and admin team had its problems in Ichiro's time as main admin. Not that I would blame anyone in particular. It was just a bad situation. Decoy was a bit of a mischief-maker but also contributed a lot as a member to debates and so on. Crus had already played his part in some situations in the same era as well, but I won't go on about that for now. BK's actions were much more difficult than any of that, though. As Cipher said, BK would not be considered a "hacker" technically since he mainly relied on group guessing of passwords with his friends, which, when our admins / mods were not often older than 20 (and were mostly years younger), was often much easier than it should be. He also had some script kiddy skills, but I don't remember them being much use to him. Formi always scoffed at what BK felt he could do / threatened to do. BK also wanted to be an admin himself and believed he could use his skills to improve the forums, but he also felt if he wasn't allowed to do so the forums would eventually die. Eventually, he took account information and used it to make trouble, but after many big debates on the possibility of closing the site, he apparently did get GT closed. I remember arguing heatedly with him about the board's future in about 3 threads at the same time one night not long before the closure - I still remember ToS' "Beat the Angel" track playing in my ears all night while I kept going at him saying we could have a "Golden Sunrise" and move out of our Golden Twilight dark ages, and have even a better time than the Summer remembered by some. I wasn't the only one - many members, old and new alike, were trying together to tell him we had a chance and to stop dragging his pessimism to extremes. But he practically laughed at that notion, repeating it was over and we were just taking part in a dying forum. (May I say - how wrong he was!) We had already organised to move to another board and thanks to other networks like our MSN community, we were able to do so without losing too many regulars. Some did give up at that point thinking that things were over, though. Also some of the troublemakers didn't make the conversion. The rest of what you said is pretty much how I understand what happened in short form, all accurate as far as I see. Well said. No mention of the elections though, I'm not sure where they fit in with all the different boards we've gone to back and forth. |
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| Ashtoro | May 10 2015, 06:06 PM Post #9 |
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Paladin of Hallowed Light
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I thought BK was an Admin? I joined relatively late in GT's life, and distinctly remember him hosting a contest where members applied to be a Moderator, which I won (though moderatorship was not actually the prize). I later was made Moderator by Ichiro for unrelated reasons, but that gig didn't last too long. I think the only time we actually had an election was when we first moved from Twilight to Sunrise on invisionfree. I remember because people didn't vote for me and I was back to being a regular member for a long time afterward. |
| -- Ashtoro | |
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| Sagie | May 11 2015, 04:22 AM Post #10 |
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crotchety
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Originally, we were GSR. way back in the forum's original years, there were some trolls that came by and annoyed Cinder and she moved away from us and made the forums on phpBB, which you guys now know as GSR. We were made first, but she liked phpBB better because it was more secure and she could do more. It was hell trying to get her to come over and admin for us for a long time. Eventually we got a GameSpy admin, who then passed adminship to me, who then passed it to Ichiro when I got too busy. Anyway, Cindy wasn't bad or mean and there was no falling out. It was just a lot of work, and her heart wasn't in it at our forum. Anyway we eventually got renamed to Golden Twilight, or GT. the reason for most of the chaos--for most spam attacks, trolling, and the eventual shutdown, was because GSR was part of the GameSpy network. Our forum was mostly inhabited by young teens--ages 11 to 16 was the main demographic, though there were some outliers. As such we were all pretty naive in one way or another, but also just wanted a place to hang out and be accepted. For some reason this was funny to the members of the bigger forums in the GameSpy network, most of whom were older or more well-versed in the Internet. Lot of them would come down and spam us or troll us or post goatse or whatever for fun. Eventually it was so out of hand that GameSpy just shut us down. BK wasn't this massive catalyst of all that was bad. Other folks had a lot to do with it too, though he was young and didn't really help matters much. We were all pretty emotionally charged back then, so a lot of stuff seemed bigger than it was and triggered bigger reactions. BK was a mod once for a few weeks but never admin that I'm aware of. Anyway, it was a bigger forum. Being a part of GameSpy and GSR, we got tons of traffic. The GSR traffic was pretty good--folks who loved the games and wanted help or just to hang out. The GameSpy traffic was frequently suck. The main thing I think was that it offered a lot of us a place to hang out and make friends as teenagers with people who shared our interests. There was a big group for a long time who got really close through the forums, MSN, LiveJournal, etc. Some of us are still around, most have moved on. A lot of the good stuff there was earlier on, before GameSpy really became aware of us. As time went on, it just got messier and messier. There's phases, and tons of names to remember, and stories like any group of folks have. I think some of the details have gotten muddy, especially since we have few sensory inputs to remember them by but also because some stuff has gotten blown out of proportion over time, and other things forgotten. The stuff from when we moved to InvisionFree is just about the way Miva said it was. Mostly I'm impressed that this single community has persisted so long. Cindy made the original GSR Forum on the GameSpy (ForumPlanet) network back in November 2002, when the game first came out. I joined in January of 03...Lumine (you've seen him around) gets trophy for longest active member though. He was a mod when I joined. Anyway if you have more specific questions, Miva knows the recent stuff pretty well, Syl's pretty well-versed in the middleish times and I know the old old stuff. Edited by Sagie, May 11 2015, 04:22 AM.
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| Harly | May 11 2015, 06:03 AM Post #11 |
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#HarlyforHarly20Harly
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When I joined GSR, like 3 or 4 years ago, Cinder was very much an absent admin. In the... 2 years (?) I think I was there, I think she posted maybe twice. I know she didn't just forget about the place, because Ren and Shadow both had her contact info outside of the forum. It also just generally had a very negative atmosphere. I mean, I had lots of friends there, there were definitely good people. But people were always trying to... out-aloof each other, maybe, and weren't very nice about people who had much less experience with forums/the internet/whatever. If I had known communities like this existed and that that wasn't the norm, I very likely would not have stayed for as long as I did. |
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"He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking." Awards! Certificate of Not Being A Loser Baronly Crest
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| Zeige | May 11 2015, 07:54 AM Post #12 |
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Part-Time Weeb
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Yeah, I remember Ren and Shad talking about her frequently, but she really had no presence at GSR. The only authority figures there were the mods like Xeno and Raggy, but I can't say I remember too much about them other than a few details. Xeno would post on the spam threads a lot and would only show up on the other threads if he needed to lay down the law, which was fairly often, surprisingly. Raggy I never really talked to, but she would post like a regular member. Once the TinyChat server was set up, I remember Xeno being on there a lot, as well as that Lumine fella, who would always put on some pretty chill music. But as for when it became such a negative place, I'm not exactly sure if I can pinpoint that and I'd really rather not name drop anyone to avoid unnecessary gossip. My beginning days on the forum were a bit hazy, because there were a lot of boards to drop in on, and the two boards that I mainly visited were the spam/random post threads and the Dark Dawn spoilers and speculations threads. I also remember that we had a hurt and heal thread, where we have every single character from Golden Sun and hurt one of them as we heal the other. We also had the shipping thread, where members would Once Golden Sun Twitter took off, my activity on the forums decreased heavily, but it was during that time that I saw a bit of a decline whenever I'd go on. It got pretty bad, as you said, everyone was trying to out-aloof each other, or have competitions of cynicism. In summer of 2011 (and up through 2012), a lot of people ended up migrating from there to find places that weren't filled with that, and ToK was one of those places if I'm not mistaken. GSU itself was an offshoot made in around 2013, though it didn't last too long. After it went down, everyone found themselves at home here, which is pretty cool. Not too long after that, GSR closed its doors and everyone who was left set up Golden Sun Land.
Interesting, is that why you guys decided to call this place Golden Sunrise? I never took into consideration that Golden Sun is a game targeted towards teens, so creators of these forums were people who weren't even close to 20. It wouldn't be too unexpected for Lord of the Flies-like scenarios to unfold haha. But I'm sure it turned out to be a very helpful learning experience in the long run. And then with Dark Dawn rejuvenating the franchise, there was finally a balance between the target demographic and the older members joining in. Hmm... now I can't help but wonder what the community would be like if Dark Dawn never happened, or if it'd still be a community at all... Was there any reason as to why the forum died down a couple years back? Even after the surge of newcomers to the series that Dark Dawn had brought in? And you guys aware of what was going on with the other forums like ToK? |
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| Miva | May 11 2015, 09:45 AM Post #13 |
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We're very much called Sunrise for that reason. Despite our hopes we really didn't see a serge of new member back when DD came out, maybe one or two found their way to the new forum we made, but that was it. I did my best to advertise, but really only managed to affiliate with some of the other GS forums; anyone on those forums was already on a better GS forum so was unlikely to move over. Back then I wasn't so savy with advertising and didn't use things like facebook/twitter/Reddit/Deviant art to advertise our presence so we just lacked any kind of visibility. We had a few projects going: decided we were going to make a full walkthrough with maps and stuff, we were going to re-make the GS world using the elder scrolls modding kit thing and probably a load more projects I've forgotten about, but none of them got far enough to put us on the map. I never spent much time on ToK though other members have (I believe Dragomir has always been a member of Sunrise as well as ToK, and other newer members like Frozen are originally from ToK). I spent some amount of time the lost waters, they've been suffering from the loss of the sea king for a long time and were diminishing too, though I believe he recently came back. I've spent a little time at all of the other forums while setting up affiliations, advertising events and that kind of things, though usually not long enough to get a real feeling of the community. Edited by Miva, May 11 2015, 09:45 AM.
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| Sagie | May 11 2015, 01:29 PM Post #14 |
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crotchety
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I'm talking way further back as regards Cinder. Like, 2003-2006 or so. She was pretty active on GSR back then because there was stuff to be active about. I only know that because I would pop over occasionally to track her down when stuff went wrong on GT. |
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| Flamy | May 11 2015, 01:51 PM Post #15 |
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Token Bad Teammate
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... Interesting. So this community is, technically, older than the Temple of Kraden. |
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