• X-Boards memberlist from August 2003
• X-Boards memberlist from October 2001
• Retired X-Staff profiles
• Aldera.net history & memberlist

A brief history of our website and community

The history of this community began on December 1st 1998 when a Star Wars fan from Toronto, Canada called Sevaan Franks launched a single page website called Episode-X. In October of the following year, a teenager equally smitten with the Star Wars universe from Basel, Switzerland launched his own fansite, Prequel Trilogy.net. Tai-Zec, as he was then known continued to run his site until april of 2000 when he and some friends collaborated to launch Star Wars Union.

By August of 2000 Tai had made contact (via fan forums) with various people who had access to inside information on the upcoming Star Wars Episode 2, which at that point was being filmed in Sydney.

At this point SWU and Episode-X still existed as separate entities, but Sevaan and Tai became good friends. In September of 2000 Tai was supplied with script pages from Star Wars Episode 2. Later that month Tai added an international outlet to SW-Union and a news page in English to feature “exclusives”. His insider contacts started supplying Tai spoiler information to post on SWU International.

In November of 2000 as Sevaan and Tai began to work closer together, Tai was appointed as the first moderator of the Episode-X forums. Behind the scenes they began to toy with the idea of creating and running a new site together.

By January of 2001 Tai had joined Sevaan at Episode-X, replacing the need for SWU International. Effectively a partnership was forged between the English Episode-X and the German SW-Union. Doing news updates in unison ran well for a while, but Sevaan started reducing his updates more and more. He liked the way SWU was structured (multiple news subsections, as opposed to the single page news front page of Episode-X) and proposed that Episode-X was redesigned and restructured after the model of SWU.

In the summer of 2001, Tai restructured and relaunched the Episode-X forums on Ikonboard 2.0 (later Ikonboard 3.0 which was reverted to v2.0 after performance issues) bulletin board software, and dubbed this new online community the ‘X-Boards’.

In September 2001, Tai, during a family visit in the UK, met fellow X-Boarder toochilled, who had accepted a moderator position at the boards.

In November of 2001 Sevaan designed a new layout and Tai started recruiting staff for the new sections that would make up the content pages of Episode-X (galleries, news, multimedia etc.). In the development of the project GunsBlazin was one of the most active helpers. By January of the following year Episode-X finally got its new look, was increased immensely in size and had its own staff. Episode-X ‘X-Clusives’ were published on the front page and the site grew rapidly.

As the Episode-X snowball gathered pace, Chris Sherman’s EpisodeII.com (from which Nightly.net founded June 1st 1999 is a spinoff) merged with the site (13th February 2002). Around this time the first seeds of the ‘Project-X’ idea were sewn, a concept that was discussed for around four months. Tai forged links with the webmasters of a large Polish SW fansite, the Franco-Canadian SithClan and SWU. Together the webmasters planned on creating a giant, multilingual forum that would eventually grow with more and more fansites from different linguistic cultures. Regrettably the project never saw the light of day.

By March 2002 , the X-Boards server was groaning under high traffic loads and Sevaan asked for donations to buy a replacement. The very next month, due to reliability problems, the X-Boards staff decided to upgrade the forum software from Ikonboard 2.0 to EZboard (CSC Gold). On the 15th of the month Vanda and Silmarillion were appointed as X-Staff. Silmarillion was brought aboard to handle graphics on the site, news updates and prequel related multimedia items and to administrate the X-Boards. Vanda’s role included handling news updates and prequel database items.

By late 2002 the fervour that was associated with the release of a new Star Wars movie had died down and the main focus of the site shifted from the front page to the forums. Ternian was appointed as moderator and periodically updated the front page with information. In August xSith Happensx was appointed as moderator.

On Friday 8th November 2002 the X-Boards went PHP. Recognising the potential of the open source phpBB bulletin board platform, the forums were upgraded. In January of 2003, Silmarillion purchased the domain name, www.x-boards.com, providing members with another route to the community and further reinforcing the X-Boards brand. The following month xSith Happensx was promoted to the role of admininstrator.

Again a period of stability followed and on Jun 13th 2003 Insert Username was appointed as EU moderator in the Books and Comics and Fan Fiction forums. The peace was soon shattered however when Ternian and Tai disagreed about how the front page updates were being written. Following this dispute Ternian resigned. Ternian went on to work with Darthpsychotic, another veteran of the Star Wars spoiler scene in developing the popular millenniumfalcon.com website and message boards.

After this schism, in August 2003, the X-Boards database was damaged and a brand new phpBB installation was performed. Unfortunately though all of the old topics and posts were lost. In a fresh start for the community, Cam was appointed as moderator and Vanda was promoted to administrator. During the planned period between August 2003 and January 2004, Tai’s plans to overhaul Episode-X never materialised and on the 14th of January he resigned as administrator of Episode-X.

By this time the content of the X-Boards, due to the explosion in popularity of humor threads was in disarray and it was decided to contain these topics in a dedicated forum. A new forum called ‘Spammer’s Paradise’ was created solely for the purpose of posting spam and humor threads. Reek Poodoo was appointed as the ‘Master of Spam’ to oversee the mayhem and edit user’s posts for maximum comic effect. Threads were automatically pruned after seven days to keep the size of the database in check. At first the forum was a great success until there was a disagreement with xSith Happensx over the appointinment of ‘Spam Apprentices’. The end result was that in July 2004 the spam master embarked on a tequila-fueled rampage and deleted every single topic and post in the forum. A lengthy ban ensued during which Elgar, Reek Poodoo and Livi (later Dave and Roman City Cobra) started their own short-lived online community called ‘The Cheeseboards’.

In early 2004, Elgar and Roman City Cobra had started to work on the first organised meeting of the X-Boards membership. On Saturday 30th October 2004 at the Nottingham Moat House in the United Kingdom, a group of X-Boarders met for the first time. Nightmare, Sil, Roman City Cobra, Aquarian, Magic Allen, Headthrob, Elgar and Robot were all present for the event dubbed UKXI.

In February 2005 following a disagreement between the staff of Episode-X and the millenniumfalcon.com, ties between the two sites were severed and the admin positions held by Toochilled and xSith Happensx at the MF were revoked. Database corruption at the X-Boards meant that the forums once again had to be rebooted for a fourth time. Unfortunately despite Nightmare and xSith Happensx best efforts all of the topics and posts were once again lost.

By March 2005, Mitch & Elgar were appointed as moderators and plans were already afoot to arrange a second meeting of X-Boarders in the UK to coincide with the release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. In May, Nightmare, Sil, Roman City Cobra, Headthrob, Elgar, Moose, Tai, Eren and Robot met up for the UKXII event in London. Members travelled to the event from as far afield as Switzerland and Ireland. During the weekend Tai, Sil & Elgar discussed the possibility of realising the ‘X-Realms’ concept originally devised by xSith Happensx and Cam. The group discussed appointing a new moderator and bringing Tai back out of retirement to spearhead the project. When they returned, Dave was immediatley appointed as moderator and a couple of days later Tai officially came out of retirement to return to the role of admininistrator.

In April, Silmarillion, Dave. Zygster and SkyVortex made contact at the Star Wars Celebration 3 event in Indianapolis marking the first time that X-Boarders had met on US soil.

In August of 2005 Elgar was appointed as administrator, followed soon by Cam. Both were brought on board to help realise the X-Realms project. Elgar immediately investigated new content management and bulletin boards solutions for the new site. The staff collectively tested the various systems until the Invision platform was finally chosen as the basis for the new site. Silmarillion specifically worked on creating a brand new skin for the boards whilst Tai concentrated on the forum structure.

Over the weekend of the 27th and 28th August 2005 the X-Realms was finally launched with Nightmare handing over the responsibility of hosting the boards to Elgar. After much initial tweaking and few teething problems the new Invision Power Boards proved to be both reliable and fast with a host of new features providing a new level of customisation. For the first time ever in the process of X-Boards forum software migration, topics and posts from the old boards were saved.

By October of the same year two new features were launched: the X-Realms blog module and the X-Realms galleries. The most major improvement however came on October 21st when the X-Realms front page was launched. Sporting a competition-winning design chosen by the X-Boarders themselves, the new portal provided an attractive front end incorporating news, original articles and commentary.

The community aspect of the site continued to experience ups and down in 2005. Moderator JD McGee departed after criticising the new X-Realms management and Her Highnessness retired from her role as moderator due to lack of free time. On the 3rd of December Sil, Tai, Roman City Cobra, Moose and Elgar once again met up, this time in Chester in the United Kingdom for an event that they called UKXMAS. Happily that very month, xSith Happensx returned as administrator, at first to stand in temporarily for the absent Silmarillion, but eventually on a permanent basis.

For a board whose membership joined in order to mainly discuss the Star Wars saga, the theatrical release of the final prequel episode in 2005 certainly had an effect on the membership. After the excitement and discussion about the movie had died down, a portion of the membership slowly drifted away from the X-Boards. However, the strong community element of the site that had been built up over the years allowed the forums to remain viable with the hardcore membership continuing to log in, and a number of new members joining the family. A shift of focus from the Star Wars fan domain to encompass a more general range of subjects had allowed the X-Realms to appeal to a broader range of visitors, although the Star Wars fans are expected to return in numbers when the saga is resurrected on TV in the near future.

On March 21st 2006, a long term dispute was settled when Elgar managed to reclaim the original episode-x.com domain name which had lapsed and been purchased by a third party. The staff had now acquired www.episode-x.com, www.x-realms.net, www.x-realms.com and www.x-boards.com. In a further stroke of nostalgic inspiration, in May xSith Happensx restored the Episode-X archives which included early archived episode-x site pages and a version of the old message boards.

At the end of July 2006, the X-Staff finally realised phase 3 of the X-Realms development project with the launch of the Wordpress powered front end. After some clever coding work from Silmarillion and database integration from xSith Happensx the X-Realms finally got a content management system to match the specification layed out at the beginning of the project.

In August 2006 DMax and Pat were awarded X-Staff positions in recognition of their outstanding efforts in writing original articles and reviews for the X-Realms portal. Shortly afterwards, long time members Carlos and Tobi were added to the staff. Around this time, Cam resigned from his admin position and accepted the status of X-VIP.

In December 2006, Silmarillion, Elgar, James and Mr and Mrs Roman City Cobra travelled to Switzerland to visit Tai. The trip was followed by another event in May 2007 when  El Eshoo and partner travelled to the UK and were greeted by Elgar, Jaguar Wong and Throb.

By 2007 the original team of guest writers had all moved on due to work commitments but the X-Realms team was bolstered by the addition of Jaguar Wong who volunteered to write a weekly gaming column called Console Yourself with Jaguar Wong.

July 2007 will see the largest ever meeting of X-Boarders as members from around the world congregate in London.

By 2008 Jangofett101 had joined the moderator team.  Shortly afterwards Elgar resigned from the administration team.