Mar 18: Exilian Founded. Pentagathus is M&B Admin, Jubal Head Admin, Marcus Tech Admin.
Mar 30: Citizenship Established
Apr 07: Southern Realms mini-beta released
Jun 03: SOTK becomes first elected admin
Jul 19: Dripping D becomes a global moderator. He wins every subsequent election to keep his position.
Sep 20-24: Pentagathus abuses his power to turn Exilian into Wibulnubniblia and is removed, given the position of King of the Wibulnibs for posterity instead. Private Clark becomes M&B admin.
Oct 27: Constitution created
Dec 20: Stormcloud becomes elected admin
Jan 12: Dripping D wins re-election
Jan 18: Warhammer TW Beta release
Mar 30: Andalus becomes a moderator
Apr 18: Private Clark falls to a Vote of No Confidence
Apr 30: Darkstar becomes M&B Admin, Persian Invasion beta release
Jun 21: First full election season begins.
Jul 6: Election ends. DD & BoyNinja are moderators, Stormcloud is re-elected as admin
Sept 6: Europe 1080 released
Sep 11: Comrade_General becomes RTW admin
Oct 15: BoyNinja becomes M&B admin
Dec 28: First Amendment to the constitution is ratified.
Jan 24: Unchallenged election: Dimos is admin, Silver Wolf and DD are moderators
Feb 12: Final Southern Realms release
Jun 28 - July 4: Election, Dimos is unseated as admin by Silver Wolf, DD and LordRyan are moderators
Jul 6: "New Deal" passed allowing subforums and additions to the site as requested by members
Oct 31: Persian Invasion patch released
Nov 8: BoyNinja resigns as M&B admin
Dec 2: Warhammer TW campaign release
Jan 15: Narnia TW mini-beta release
Jan 22: Phoenixguard ratified replacing BoyNinja as M&B admin. Discussion Collonade created
Jan 25: Election: Silver Wolf is re-elected as admin, Dripping D and IFMN are moderators
Feb 1: Second Amendment ratified, tribunes created
Feb 16: Silver Wolf resigns as admin
Feb 19: Debux and Calisthenis elected as first tribunes
Mar 13: By-Election, Son of the King returns to adminhood
Mar 20: JuBot released for the first time
May 09: Triumph system established
Jun 08: First political party, Vive Exilian, founded by DD
Jun 12-25: Election; SOTK returned as Sebastokrator, DD and Nightangel as Spatharioi, Debux and Goldy as Tribounoi
Jul 30: Total War - Orcs and Humans released
Aug 20: Histories Begun
Dec 5: Malware attack begins; issue publicly announced.
Dec 8: Third Amendment passed, creating Basileus position
Dec 10: Forums for Internet Freedoms party (FIF) formed
Dec 15: Exilian Control and Heuristic Operations party (ECHO) formed.
Dec 23: User-end malware problem ends, main site taken down. Forum returns and is upgraded to SMF 2.0.
Dec 28: Elections belatedly begin
Jan 5: Election results released. Jubal wins newly formed Basileus post for FIF, DD and NA are moderators (FIF and Independent respectively), SOTK wins a second term as Sebastokrator for FIF, and Ladyhawk and Death Nade become Tribunes (both as ECHO representatives).
Jan 14: Andalus given first official Exilian triumph, mostly for services to the poetry section.
My story - and Exilian's - started with a site called Mixed Mods. I joined Total War Center on the last day of 2006, and helped Marcus with creating a dismounted unit of Praetorian cavalrymen as part of my early forays into modding RTW. On Feb 18, I got the following PM:
Hi Jubal, Marcus here, fancy joining my forum? If you do, see if you can bring a couple of others in as well.
Cheers,
Marcus Orentius
And thus it began. I fairly quickly got Warhammer: Total War hosted having started working on it, and became a global moderator for the Mixed Mods site.
I shall here provide a description of the governance and foci of MM: The site was based around Rome: Total War modding almost entirely. A few of us had M&B, and I'd started some initial tinkering around with it, but it was total war modding that defined the site. Marcus' work was mostly in dismounting units - Scythians especially - and making minimods; I was mostly ploughing on with Warhammer: TW. I made a few other minimods such as Cities Alive and Walls of Jericho which are still available to this day, though.
There were four "houses" of higher level members (who might've been called citizens but I can't remember) on MM: Marcus, as the admin, had one, Dray/Vampire, the tech guy, had one, I had one and so did (I think) Mars. The "citizens" had no statutory rights whatsoever, I think they might've had their own forum but that was about it. We had a Workshop Booze Up thread, certainly, but the site's activity was entirely modding related. There was a wiki called Communipedia, a rather joking attachment to the site.
As for the members, several modders who would later become integral to Exilian were already around: Son Of The King was in my house, Private Clark was (I think) in that of Marcus. There was also a rather quiet member called stormcloud who posted in the WHTW section on occasion.
So that was MM (I'll add more later if I remember more). I was there for about a year - but then, things suddenly went wrong.
Mixed Mods disappeared in early March, 2008. It did so more or less without warning; we had had a site, we now did not have a site. And most of the "we" weren't easy to get hold of. Fortunately, via TWC and MSN, contact with Marcus was re-established. We tried for a week or so to contact Vampire, but to no avail. Eventually, I decided it would be best to pull people together on a temporary forum until we could get mixed mods back. I see the fact that you're probably reading this on that temporary forum the best part of half a decade (at least) later as a reasonable justification for that decision. The first post went as follows:
Mixed Mods is down. TWC overrun by n00bs and M2TW players (who I'm jealous of for having a newer game than me). The internet is therefore by a
long leap of logic in crisis.
This is where we fight back. This is where we stand. This is Exilian.
In other words, this is a temporary (perhaps to become semi-permantent) forum for homesick users of mixed mods, but with more of a focus on
M&B.
As the post indicates, I designed the forum with M&B more in mind, giving it an equally sized section to Rome: Total War. The dark blue and black colour scheme dates from this point, too (the motto "He walked through the darkness, and so saw the light" was inscribed beneath the title if I remember correctly, though I may just be misremembering). I named the forum "Exilian" in reference to the fact that its members were exiled from Mixed Mods.
Or at least, some were. Son of the King, Marcus, Mars, and Private Clark were continuations, as well as Stormcloud, who moved from quietly hanging around the Warhammer Total War board to propping up and then dominating the new Boozer, complete with new Workshop Booze up. There were new faces too though, particularly some from my school; the first twenty members included Pentagathus and Dripping D, both school-friends of mine who were in different ways to be major forces in shaping the Exilian to come.
The thing I shall deal with in this chapter is the birth of the citizenry, Exilian's body of voters, and how their rights came to be. It's probably one of the most important things in the history of our site, as the peculiarities of our system have undeniably shaped the way our site is to be run. To look at its genesis, I will turn back to Total War Center. As my first forum, it was this place, then in the latter days of its more republican stage, that initially showed me how such a system could work. The idea that moderators and some staff should be elected seemed always to be a fairly sensible one to me - so long as the citizenry could be reasonably representative of the site it gave a very direct, powerful mechanism for feedback between staff and the people they were staffing for. It also could engage people with issues of how to run the site and how it was staffed, preventing a major divide growing up between an insular nucleus of staffers and the wider forumites I was, therefore, convinced that giving some representation to our members could only be a force for good. I do not yet think I have been proven wrong.
Ironically, just as the citizenry was established on Exilian (March 2008) and our first Sebastokrator (then, if I recall, simply the Protector of the People) elected (Son of the King, June 08, beating Private Clark and Dripping D), TWC's democracy was beginning to wither. As our citizens were given rights by the staff, TWC's voted theirs away; I suppose the key difference was that the Curia on Total War Center had always at heart been a way for the community to make its voice heard against site owners, so when an owner from the community (Imb39) took over it was felt that its function was lost. The Hidden Plaza was, on the other hand, right from the outset specifically designed to give members a voice at all levels of staff.
This was the initial declaration of the citizenship:
Citizenship of the forums is extended to all members with 50+ posts, or modders who have made a valuabel contribution, or members
who have excellent quality of conributions.
Citizens may, in this forums, propose and vote on changes to the forums, in terms of skins, new subforums, chages to the Terms of Service, and so
on.
The Citizens also provide the Moderators and vote on who should get the honour of the name Tzakone and the red lettering. Tzakones get 3 month
terms in office.
Admins are as follows;
1 head admin (Jubal)
1 TW Admin
1 M&B Admin (Pentathagnus)
1 Admin for the Citizens (elected by popular vote for a term of 6 months).
This was, if you like, the proto-constitution for the early days, though the real deal was not long to follow. My work as head of administration was for the most part involved in thinking how all of this should work - should there be judges for moderation appeals? Who should be allowed to appoint junior staff? By May I had a basic framework of 1 elected admin, 3 nonelected (TW/M&B/Root), and two elected moderators (by then Magister Militae, with the Tzakone title being used for junior moderation staff).
A constitution was a somewhat inevitable step after that, and the initial draft was posted on the fourth of October; the basic framework is still what we use today.
Some interesting points of note include the addition of Tribunes; these were removed again by the first amendment, not becoming a fully fledged part of staff until 2011. The principle of citizenship being a gift made by the citizenry was established at this point, as was the idea that citizens having the right to vote on changes was a fundamental and inalienable part of citizenship, not touchable by the administrators.
Our initial four person admin team, of course, was soon to undergo its first major change.
When I started getting into modding RTW, one of the things I liked doing was downloading and augmenting small mods to the existing game. Mostly it was reskins and new units, which steadily built up a version of RTW for me. I had looked at the mega mods like EB, RTR etc. and although they offered some good things, I didn't want everything they had to offer, so I mainly stuck with my hybrid RTW. As I got deeper into modding, I thought it would be a good idea to start a site for people to present mods and collaborate to combine them into their preferred combinations. In retrospect, it was a pretty dead end idea, and Mixed Mods became a small modding site, which expanded into Mount&Blade modding.
How did I set up my own site? Well, at the time, I didn't really have much of my own money, and I'm not even sure I had a bank account at the time. At HeavenGames, I met a person called Vampiric, among other names, and started talking and hanging out with him. He had his own server space and when he learned of my idea to build a mod site, he happily gave me the space to do that, and even set up the forum for me. He then stayed around as technician, while me and Jubal tottered around the world of forum running like toddlers. Vamp also helped me to build a site to accompany Mixed Mods, and it was really there that I learnt about making websites proper. Then all of a sudden, the hosting went down and Vamp was no where to be seen. Either he moved on, or something happened in real life, I don't know. At that point I lost interest and let MM sink, while focusing on real life etc.
A few months later Jubal contacted me, telling me he had restarted the site and renamed it Exilian, and even had some of the old guard with him. It was really due to his enthusiasm that I rejoined and took a staffing and technical role at Exilian. I got more and more into it, taking the staffing quite seriously, as I remember, and I'm sure Jubal had to rein me in from banning somebody on the grounds that if I did, we'd have no visitors. I dabbled in modding RTW and M&B for a while, but never really got deeply into it, so left those departments to Jubal and CG, focusing myself on the technical side of maintaining the forum and the associated site I had built with it. At this point I had my own hosting space, so had my own playground to play in, and had various little projects I was working on, none of which I finished. I guess I'm just that kind of guy. Exilian however was more serious, as it had other people using it, contributing and appreciating the work I did. In time, the limitations of Invisionfree/Zetaboards got too restrictive for me, so I set about preparing the forum to move to a forum on my own hosting. Unfortunately, there are no official tools that can transfer Zetaboards data to SMF, so I found a third party tool that would download all the information to my computer in database format, at which point I could re upload it to SMF. Accounts, threads, forums and posts would all be preserved, not bad considering the major lack of compatibility between platforms. Seems the middle man has some use after all. Unfortunately I had missed the fact that we had several private passworded forums, which the software couldn't access data from for obvious reasons, so merely skipped them. Not too much of a problem as those forums could have their stuff transferred manually, even if it was a bit tedious. The changing of the forums for me was an interesting time, a test, if you will, of whether I could actually do it without major cock ups, and as things settled down, it seemed I could.
However, not long after, I was losing interest again, as my real life activities changed and I lost interest in web development and technical computing in general. I also saw that my hosting was leeching from my bank account, and although the money going out was small, if I had little interest in maintaining Exilian, what point was there in me paying for it? It was at that point that I decided to resign, and hand over technical duties, ownership and thus payment, to Exilian.
The nice thing with this particular case is that, although it has all the hallmarks of me having a lack of commitment and easily losing interest, I felt good about what I had done, as Exilian had taken on a life of its own and could survive and thrive quite happily without my inattentive stewardship. Now you've probably been reading this and thinking, 'what, we were nothing more than an idle experiment?!?' and probably thinking of me as a pretty armadilloty person. But as I have said, it's not the case here. To me, this is not something I have abandoned and left to die, but something I have worked on for years, and now wish to move on from. I love this place, the people here, the hijinks, and the mods and other content, and wish it to continue. But I also knew it couldn't really go anywhere fast with an inattentive site owner who didn't want to continue and pay the bills, so I stood aside to let others with more enthusiasm fill the void, and here it is, still going strong.
Despite all I've said, I love this place, and enjoy coming back once in a while to see how the place is doing, and it's doing fine. This is mainly due to Jubal doing most of the work, even when I was on board, and pressing forward to build the community, which has shown results. Bravo, Jubal, and bravo to all the staff here that keep the place running day by day, you're great!