On this day ten years ago (March 15, 1997) this site was officially launched when this message was posted to usenet:
I have started up a page dedicated to discussion on the topic of bondage scenes from mainstream media. The page doesn't have a lot to it yet (I only worked on it for a few hours so far), but it does have forums for posting about trades, VCR alerts, and general discussion.
This is not a porn page, there aren't any graphics (at the moment), and I'm not selling anything. I just want to have a place for people interested in a specialized subject to communicate.
I'd be happy if you'd check it out, and please feel free to give me some feedback, either by email or posting a message on the discussion page.
Ten years whole years, huh? Hard to believe sometimes. Some of may not be aware of the past history, so I'll go over it. I started this all as a free Tripod page, back in the "Golden Age" of user web sites. Back then, the sites weren't limited in bandwidth, although they were somewhat tightly size-limited in the beginning (hence the "no images"). This meant that you could reasonably host a page on Tripod or Geocities and have pretty good traffic.
The facilities for doing a message board were limited at the time. I used their canned guestbook cgi. I had to do all management, such as deleting posts or whatever, strictly by editing an HTML file created by the guestbook. That also meant that every time you looked at it, you saw every message.
Here's a look back at those days in an article from the Ezine
The unwieldy management, and some other issues with Tripod (rumors of crackdowns on content) led us in December of 1997 to Dreambook, a dedicated site for guestbooks.
This has a fairly familiar looking layout, I'm sure. We were there for two years. It still had a lot of problems in that it really wasn't designed for the purpose. Again, there was little control for the user over what messages were displayed. I eventually decided to search for a new home, and so brianspage.com came into being. I created the forum software, and rolled out the new site on January 1st, 2000.
From that time, we've been cranking along here. There have been a few rough patches, while there are have been a few malcontents and trolls, most participants are great. The Avatars like The Moderator and the The Engineer came into being along the way. Moving to a dedicated site also allowed the Scene Database to really develop. That may be the real legacy when it's all said and done.
Along the way we experimented with a free-wheeling forum, Anything Goes, which for better or worse was at least interesting. For various reasons, I ended that after a relatively short time. Mainly I didn't feel it was generally as useful as I wanted, and it was becoming a bit of a bandwidth/storage hog.
I started the Ezine in 2001, and while we haven't had an issue for some time, I haven't given up on trying to come up with a solution that will allow us to do some interesting things there without me having to put in the amount of work necessary under the original format. I'm still generally very pleased with the issues that we did, and I'd like to find some way to go from there. General plans for improving the forum software and the Database are there, but time just hasn't presented itself for getting that sort of thing done.
I'll close as I usually do for the yearly message: Happy anniversary to all of you! As always, that's because YOU make this page what it is.