So we've all made it another year, holding this board together no matter how close it gets to mothballs at times. To mark the occasion, the biggest wrestling promotion in the world is holding a special battle royal tonight in our honor.
I've been working flat-out behind the scenes lately, on something that puts me in the mood for reflection. So let's look back at PWH over the last 12 months since our 6(66)th anniversary.
In the first half of the year we still had
HPW thanks to Illusion and Hazzy, an e-fed that in my opinion was tremendously well run and written. I had great fun exploring the character of Jimmy Duxen, and I hope that one day there'll be the support for Headline Pro Wrestling to rise again.
Speaking of Hazzy and the Great Welsh Manchild, the past year saw the first big case of these forums influencing lives when they actually
moved in together, a few months after Illy
came out of the closet. Despite only watching it unfold online, I think I was as excited and nervous as they were, and it was a rare situation to witness on a forum.
That breaking of the barrier between the Internet and real life brought with it Illy's brother Deadpool, creating the latest in what's almost become a tradition of sibling posters on this board. But compared to even the Gopher/Professor brotherhood and La Familia, this may prove to be the most dysfunctional family in PWH history.
Other posters came and went over the course of the year. We sadly appear to have
lost Kraul, one of the longstanding pillars of our community. But amongst a few
brief cameos, we've been blessed with the surprise return of RagingCalm, who's picked up the slack like he never went away.
To try and boost that activity some more, we experimented with the concept of
Forum GMs - flagbearers for each brand of wrestling, who would be responsible for stirring up discussion on relevent topics. Despite some welcome efforts, it was decided for several reasons that it just wasn't working at this time. Though with this experience to draw upon, it's perhaps an idea we'll be able to revisit and tweak in the future.
This year we hopped aboard the
social networking bandwagon by adding Twitter support to the forums, which also handily updates our Facebook status, broadcasting new thread links to over 300 wrestling fans. Now all we need to figure out is how to make those "friends" register and post...
On the topic of eery silences, Sarah's trip to the Bermuda Triangle continued to
play on people's minds, like a TV series axed without a conclusion. It's not often she could be likened to Al Swearengen.
For the first time in a long time, overenthusiasm killed a forum project when the
PWH TV Club descended into an Oz season marathon instead of an episode-by-episode discussion. Perhaps this could be resurrected for a currently airing show, so that skipping ahead isn't possible? Children need boundaries.
The eternal conundrum of the YouTube tag was solved this year by adding more intuitive functionality. Now instead of grappling with an abomination of BBCode, even the
most royal of technophobes oughta be able to
embed videos with just a URL.
We were also
hacked by Mr Bump. There's really nothing one can add to that sentence to enhance the story.
Seven years in, we still face many riddles in trying to keep these forums afloat and make them both attractive to new members and engaging for the active posters we have. Like fans of Lost, we've persevered for too long now to lose the answers to those riddles. With everyone's help, we can all contribute to an upward trend for the next twelve months, and plans will soon hit the table to maybe let this board find its niche, during what
could be an exciting year for pro wrestling as a whole, and for these forums in particular.
Thanks for reading.
Oh, I nearly forgot. I was poking around the
front page this morning and found, cunningly hidden, a very old feature called the X-Directory. It seems the damnedest thing happens when you enter the code 013103, the birthdate of these forums.
