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Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Remembering AE Boards
This may be surprising to some members, but AE (Anime Explosion) was once on friendly terms with theOtaku and it's staff members. In fact, there was once a time when both sites shared the same basic moderating staff.
There once was a staff member for theOtaku.com named Rick Hunter. He was a talented webmaster, and years before working with Adam he had his own successful anime website, Anime Explosion. Using his wide knowledge of anime and some old fashioned hard work he was able to write detailed summaries on nearly every anime movie you could think of. The problem was that poor Kevin couldn't attract a wide enough audience to financially support his site, so he needed to find a way to drive traffic into AE. Kevin, and Adam (the beloved headmistress of theOtaku) worked out an agreement where Kevin would let Adam use some of his content to create a new Movies section. The theory was that people would be so impressed by Kevin's content that they would demand more, and as a result run over to Anime Explosion.
But this just didn't happen. As much as people were impressed by the content of AE, they just didn't find it to be as user-friendly and fun as other sites (like theOtaku.) The thing is that AE had nearly everything that theOtaku did. That is, it had everything except for a message board. So Mr. Hunter created his own message board with an all-star staff of OB members to run it. Two of our wonderful Gods (Category Mods) helped to launch it, and their popularity drew a LOT of OB-ers.
Staff members had a bad habit of leaving the site for a variety of reasons, and as a result of this constant rotation there were literally dozens of moderators throughout a period a year-long period. Nearly every notable “oldie” was a moderator of AE Boards, and many more ran over there during OB’s massive downtime last year (That deserves it’s own story.) I got my first job as a Category Anime Mod on AE Boards, and it ended up giving me some much-needed experience. The same could be said for members like Queen Asuka, Syk3 and Crazy White Boy; they received their first chances to be mods and admins from Anime Explosion.
Being active in several different web forums can be difficult, though. When James gave members their chance to be a staff member at OB they dropped their positions at AE. This (along with other things that I will NEVER discuss again) really upset AE’s founder and some bitterness ensued for the months and years to come. He threw out nearly every OB-er out of his site, and attempted to create a new community, rather than trying to build off of an already successful group.
So yeah, that’s a little tibit for newer members who know nothing about the long history of AE Boards. The two sites were very helpful for each other at one point, but over time they drifted apart. Where are AE Boards now? They were shut down forever last week.
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