The Animorphs Fan Forum Blog

The forum software, phpBB has just been upgraded from v3.0.3 to v3.0.4. The new version incorporates a couple of general bug fixes, corrects some minor issues, patches two security bugs and also increases load performance significantly.

The upgrade went smoothly without any hiccups.

Today is the One Year Anniversary of the Animorphs Fan Forum! So, to celebrate, I’m going to tell everyone out there on the world wide web the story of how I became an Animorphs fan, along with a touch of AFF’s history.

I’d always eyed the Animorphs books in the library… intrigued by the cover pictures. Of course, I never actually picked one up and read it, but I would occasionally pull the books half-way off the little rotating rack and gaze at the covers. That was back when I was… what, eight or nine?

Anyway, one day about a year ago, I was day-dreaming about animals, and the morphing thereof. From somewhere, the memory of those shiny, appealing book-covers came bubbling up into the forefront of my mind. Now, at this point I had an exponentially more substantial set of resources, (namely Google), with which to locate information, so I turned those resources towards finding more about the Animorphs.

I of course spent a considerable amount of time poking around on the Scholastics Animorphs sight, and when that resource was exhausted, I turned to Wikipedia. I read every last plot synopsis for every single Animorphs book. But that wasn’t enough. By that point I was hooked; I needed to read the real books.

Of course, being a sixteen year old and going down to the kid’s section of the library to check out books can be just slightly embarrassing, and it was quite some time before I plucked up the courage to do it. When I finally did check out the first ten books, I told the librarian that it was in my sister’s name. (I still feel guilty about that…)

I read the first ten books about five times each, till I had them practically memorized. By the time the three weeks were over, I was sincerely in love with Jake, Rachel, Ax, Marco and Tobias. (Even back then I hated Cassie…). I had to read the rest of the books; that much I knew. But I also was unable to bring myself to go to the library and check out the next books. So, I did what I should have done all along.

Of course, the Google search for “Animorphs” “Ebooks” “free download” lead my on quite a long and drawn out chase, leading most often to a free download of some new book by K.A.A., not the Animorphs. Finally, Google lead me to RAF. I registered there, but since I gave a dummy email address, I was unable to validate my account. Thus, I continued searching until I found it: The Animorphs Fan Forum.

I registered, and immediately downloaded all the ebooks. (We didn’t have the five post requirement back then.) As I was reading them, however, I came up with more and more nitpicks, (or KASUs), that I simply had to find out if anyone else had ever thought of them before. So, I returned to AFF, and, after posting my favorite character, I went right to work with my list of nitpicks.

I remember well those early days, when it was just me, Ellimist, and Darkflame posting in the Coffee Lounge and the discussion area. (Believe it or not, when I first joined, there were only four games in the Coffee Lounge: Choices Game, Count to 1,000,000, Ban the Person Above You and Guess Who Will Post Next.) At that time, we had just over 1000 posts, with some 200 members.

Well, a lot has changed in a year. Today, we have the number of members that we did posts when I first joined: 1275 members total. We now have nearly 26,000 posts, along with some 800 topics. And I myself, the Animorphs fan of less than a year, am an Admin on the Animorphs Fan Forum. (Yeah, go figure).

Anyway, we all owe a lot to Ellimist, Darkflame, and the other founding members of this forum, who started out as a Orkut group with a vision. And the one year anniversary of AFF is certainly a huge reason to celebrate.

So, now that the boring speech is out of the way…

LET’S PARTY!!!

Around 0000 GMT tomorrow(ie, September 14th), we’ll be shifting to a new host(namely HostDime.com), so we are expecting a few minutes of downtime. The board will be disabled prior to the host shift and will be re-enabled again after the shifting of files and databases complete.

We are sorry for any inconveniences this might cause.

Update : Shift completed with minimal downtime.

This is an announcement concerning the two new forums that have been recently created in the Coffee Lounge. Those forums are “Religion” and “Politics”. We know that a lot of our members have some strong opinions about these topics, (myself included), and we’d like to invite you to join in the discussion.

However, we will not tolerate flaming (the expression of strong, negative emotion, use of derogatory, obscene, or inappropriate language, or personal insults) on any of our forums, and these two in particular. We will be keeping a sharp eye on both of these forums for any of the things listed above.

With that out of the way, enjoy the new forums, and have a great day!

Congratulations, AFF members! We have, as of today, 906 members, 463 topics, and over 10,000 posts! We have certainly grown a lot over the past months!

We have gone from an itty-bitty forum with only a few active members and just a handful of topics to a healthy, thriving community with several very active forums in multiple languages and many active members. I hope that over the next year, we will see more of this kind of growth and progress.

Our host has recovered from the hard disk failure and all data has been restored.

Around 3 PM IST(GMT+5:30) yesterday, one of the hard drives of the server on which AFF is hosted , crashed, leading to the unavailability of the forum. I immediately pointed the domain to another host and put up a notice regarding the HDD failure. Fortunately, the hard drives at the data center were in a RAID configuration, and the data was mirrored. Immediately after the HDD failure, a new HDD was inserted into the RAID array and the data was copied to it. Since around 1 terabyte of data was lost, restoring it took quite some time and finally the hard drive was put online around 3 AM IST.

This whole fiasco lead to a massive downtime of 12 hours and I apologise for any inconvenience caused. Now everything is back to normal and the server is running optimally.

Okay, we’ve crossed the 5000 post mark!

*celebrates*

I know this ain’t much, but its pretty good after half a year in business!

As of now, we got 5029 posts!

Previously, the avatar dimension restrictions were 90px by 90px and size was restricted to 6 kB. But due to to users demanding an increase in avatar dimension/size, it’s has now been increased to 125px by 125px and maximum avatar size allowed is 200 kB.

In the last few days, the posting activities have been steadily increasing, with instances of more than 400 posts a day. As of now, we have 4255 posts and 180 topics. The most active member for the last month was Snoopy(previously mrchuckles). He’s also the member with the maximum number of posts.

We’ve now officially got 506 members!

I was checking everyday to make a post here as soon as we got 500, but after I logged out last night, we’ve had a sudden burst of activity and we’ve got 11 new members!

Say Hello to our 500th member, Jonnybokkardi!

I can’t seem to access the forum now.

Once it loaded, but without the images. So it’s most probably a server error.

I’ll look into this after I come back from school today.

Update:

The forum is back up again!