CaButler said: FFO: We're run by power hungry dictators.
Rain said: Most of us.
Crono said: I kind of miss the iron fist days. Some pretty funny shit went down then. Nobody's rights ever get affected anymore. :( haha
"I actually came over from the originator of these Final Fantasy websites, which was Final Fantasy Online," Moore says over Skype. "People from there ended up spawning Final Fantasy Worlds Apart. FF Online had a reputation, in those days, for being very strict...FFWA did not exactly have a whole lot of rules back then. It was run by mostly 14 to 18 year olds, and it was created as sort of a reaction to the harshness of FF Online."
The community surpassed Final Fantasy Online, which Robinson once thought of as the monolithic competition.
Final Fantasy Online grew by a million posts and increased its member count from 4,400 to 6,400 members between 2005 and 2006. After that, its growth slowed to about 100,000 posts per year, and its last Archive.org capture still shows "Most users ever online was 726, 01-05-2006."
Dh said: I don't know what this guy is talking about, but Final Fantasy Online didn't really "grow" at all after 2005. Our best years were between 1999 and 2004 where the site pulled millions of uniques per month, placing us above Square's official sites in search engine rankings. Likewise, we also wiped our forums quite a bit from previous hacks and crashes and in some of those instances, started from scratch. Other sites padded their statistics. We never did, nor ever needed to. Although the subject of the article is EoFF and dating (which must've been a slow news day for whoever wrote the piece), I'm surprised that Kotaku gauged the popularity and strength of other communities only by how many active members were on the forum during a small, specific period of time and not through a broader scope, such as the actual traffic going to the site from the start. FFO wasn't at the top just because of the forums. Every Final Fantasy fan site in the universe had a forum. It was popular because we had insane amounts of content that still rival many popular Wikis of today. FFO wasn't about dating or kids getting banned for posting stupid shit. FFO was about Final Fantasy. The birth of our community stemmed from that. Like it or not, the majority of Final Fantasy fan site communities afterwards stemmed from us.
amaron said: Wasn't there a site that was LITERALLY a copy and paste of most of FFO?
Yoshiyuki Ly said: I've been around since the beginning, mostly lurking. It's nice to be able to remember all the in-jokes mentioned here. I wish I'd made the time to post more often on FFO and get to know more people.
Dh said: Were we really that bad? I guess I should've paid more attention to the community back in the day. I think during FFO's run I banned ten people, if that.
Indiana Jerico said: Much as how I hate to make this comparison (because God knows I fucking hate NeoGAF's members), what the GAF mods are doing right now is basically what we were trying to achieve back then. I think most of the mods were just a bit too harsh then. But hey, we were the biggest FF fansite back then. I think there was no precedent with regards to modding a site that big, populated by people in their angsty hormonal years. === "Plans? What plans? I'm making this up as I go!"
Rain said: Well, we were pretty strict about posting standards. None of this "wats ur favrit FF gaem" nonsense around here. People would post like that, the community would ridicule them mercilessly for it, the mods would step in and close the thread or tell the person to write like a functioning human being. Then, either the person would shape up or leave. But then you had idiots who would throw a fit ("U R AFFECTING MY RIGHTS") and then we'd have a field day, culminating with an "okay, we've had our fun" and (usually) a banning. This is what they meant by "strict." I once registered on EoFF just to check it out (and because I heard SOLDIER had moved his wacky brand of insane over there after we [finally] banned him) and they basically had no standards whatsoever. The whole thing was an eyesore and the post quality was just atrocious. I never went back. "Strict" is a nice way for them to say "they were kinda assholes over there," and in a lot of ways they were right and in a lot of ways they were butthurt morons. They can keep it, I say. I like that when I read a thread here I don't have to translate half the posts from txtspk to real words just to follow along.
