What running DragonSiblings taught me
A message board I started in high school that grew to 108 members and almost 29,000 posts. It was my first real lesson in databases, hosting, and looking after a community.
In October 2003 I started a message board called DragonSiblings. I was a teenager. I had no idea I was also signing up for a years-long crash course in most of what I would end up doing for a living.
By the numbers it did better than I had any right to expect. It ended up with 108 registered members, 69 of them genuinely active, and just under 29,000 posts across about 1,862 topics. It ran from October 26, 2003 until the last post trickled in during January 2011. The busiest year, 2004, had nearly 13,000 posts on its own.
It ran on SMF, Simple Machines Forum, which meant a real MySQL database sitting behind it: tables for members, messages, topics, boards. I learned SQL the way a lot of people my age did, by needing it. I wanted a statistic the admin panel did not show, so I learned to query for it. I wanted to merge two boards or repair a broken thread, so I learned what I was actually editing. I am writing this post from a 2013 backup of that exact database, which tells you the lessons stuck, and so did the data.
It started on free hosts, Boardnation and then port5, and every time one folded or hit a limit I moved the whole thing. Eventually I put it on real paid hosting with cPanel, running on its own domain. That is where I met the unglamorous, genuinely useful work: provisioning a database, pointing a domain, reading error logs, and, most importantly, scheduling automated backups. The weekly cPanel SQL dumps I set up as a kid are the only reason any of this history still exists.
Then there is the part nobody warns you about: the people. Moderation is hard. You write the rules, you enforce them unevenly, you make calls you later regret, and you try to keep a place feeling welcoming and on topic without becoming a tyrant about it. I learned more about managing people from running a teenage forum than from any class I ever took.
I wrote a handbook for it
I took that part so seriously that at sixteen I sat down and wrote a handbook for it. A real one, with headings and an escalation ladder: a first warning, then a mute, then a “kick,” then a ban, plus notes to my fellow moderators about staying calm and not taking the bait. I will admit I cribbed a good chunk of it from a community-management guide I found online from 1998, which is the most authentically teenage-webmaster move available: discover that someone smarter has already written the rules, and reformat them into your own official-looking document. My favorite line, delivered with total sincerity at the time, was “paranoia isn’t good for tourism.”
Where we thought we’d be in 2010
By 2007 I was mostly running the place alone, and I wrote what I called my “sabbatical” post: a long, slightly dramatic goodbye that was really just a tired kid admitting he needed a break. I even did the math on what it would cost to keep the forum online until I was seventy-five, about $9,000, “not figuring deflation or inflation or change in the way the internet is used.” I was already trying to keep a promise to a place I knew I would have to let go of eventually.
Around the same time I started a thread asking everyone where they thought they’d be in 2010. We guessed out loud: out of college, maybe married, maybe running companies, maybe not around anymore. I wrote that the forum would “still be here, hopefully,” and that wherever people ended up, they should stop by and remember the posts. That one lands differently now. The forum did go quiet, but the posts really are still here.
DragonSiblings faded the way these places do. Activity thinned out after 2008, a handful of last posts came in 2011, and eventually it went dark for good. By then it had already done its real job. It taught me databases, hosting, and how to take care of a room full of people, years before anyone would pay me to do any of it.