In the beginning, there was darkness.

Then, there was ClanBOB.

Later, some other stuff happened. This page is for links to entries featuring the details of those events. Get to work, history buffs!

• DragonWorld BBS - Before ClanBOB was ever made, there was DragonWorld BBS.

My information isn't 100% correct but it is believed many of the people to do with ClanBOB first met here.

• ClanBOB
  first appeared early in 2000 when Aaron wanted to start a comic. He also wanted to include his brother, a talented artist. Aaron and Steph came up with the first comic, later redrawn by Dan. Thus LoR was born.

• ClanBOB v.2 - After some time, suffering from its popularity, the ClanBOB server needed to be upgraded, and was. This allowed the creators extra space and, with this space, they hosted some of the art and comics of the BOB community.

• The Great Crash
  - Some time early in 2002, due to server crash and backup error, the ClanBOB server lost all of its data. At the time, the site was hosting webcomics, galleries, user profiles, and other community content. This free hosting was heavily abused by non-community members (since it was a rare free service ahead of its time), and the amount of data grew so large that the backup systems failed. This error in the backup systems went undetected until a server crash occured, all data was lost, and the founders realized there were no backups.

• After an unknown amount of time, the website was brought back up, but this time only hosting LoR, as it could no longer support the other webcomics and various hosted artwork. Due to the complete data loss with no backups, the founders decided to use PHPnuke as its backend system, with both William and Presence editing the code to support the comic archive and the fanart/convention gallery. Around this time, the leaderBOBs moved the forums, previously hosted on EZBoards, onto the website server using PHPnuke's forum system.

• Hosting the forums on the website proved to be too much of a strain for ClanBOB's resources at the time, so a forum was set up at TWC. This is also the period during which ClanBOB ran ads at Penny Arcade and 8-bit Theater.

• After some dispute with the TWC administration, the forums were moved to back to EZBoards.

• After a series of unfortunate events which occured in quick succession to the leaderBOBs, (not least the unexpected death of Michael Buonauro, hurricanes, and major server hosting problems) clanbob.net disappeared for a good eight months. The largest problem was an accounting error where the owners were unbilled for several months due to incorrect account information. Instead of trying alternative methods of contact, the server host pulled the box offline and cleared all the data off of the machine.

• ClanBOB got a website again, and there were updates to the comic. But after a few more strips and six new video-based Dreams in Digital episodes, the webcomic side of ClanBOB was put on long-term hiatus. Part of this is because all of the leaderBOBs have jobs, lives and such. Part of it is from the negative e-mail the leaderBOBs got from anonymous jackasses.

• The second move from the EZBoards forums
  When the EZBoard service degraded in the summer of 2006, it was decided that maintaining the forums' Gold status -- members and mods making donations to avoid advertisements between posts -- was no longer worthwhile. This prompted discussions of alternatives and Mercan01 to offer his own server for hosting. A phpBB structure was set up, which started to attract traffic while it was in beta with esunasoul adding modifications and testing features. The move from EZBoards was completed at the end of July 2006.

Credit on a lot of this information goes to Despanan and his old FAQ.

Related: Website, leaderBOB