Well, it was basically an ordinary day.
I think I was VCM at the time.
I was just logging on yahoo and msn,
And I see all these messages.
I visited the site and there was some arabic name and symbols if I remember correctly,
I opened the FTP, where all the website files were.
Anyway I dont remember this part too good. I think what happened was that the database was made corrupt somehow,
and we were not able to restore it.
The forum is connected to the database, which saves users, posts, everything in the forum.
This happened, because we had no members with a high administrative access on the current forum, which could update it. Updates are like once every few months.
About that time, our 'website' watchman had went MIA.
Not in server, not on the site, msn or yahoo.
It took some while before anything was done about this.
The site was sorta 'offline' for a good time,
no communications.
After a while, I was able to make a simple website with a newly installed forum using a new database,
And from that, a new era began.
Not many people came to the server,
I think maybe some members thought AFL died with the website,
which it seemed a lot like it, because a lot of players just went inactive and away as our site was back up.
Only a few, that were still training for master at that time were left.
In the lead, it was basically me and Shan at the time,
Yoset was then still the CM.
We needed more members at this point,
we were so few that we had to use ourselves multiple times in a test for the current students.
Lone was one of the students.
With the situation like this, I went to Yoset because I had an idea.
AFL was in the same situation some years earlier due to some outbreak in the council or something. I was training to be a Fallen Master (RM) at the time.
I wasnt too high in the ranks,
the 'Dark Jedi' faction was new.
Anyway, what Yoset did back then
was to give us active master rank and admin privileges.
I came to Yoset with the same suggestion, to raise their ranks to master instantly due to the situation.
It was granted immediately.
Yoset was then beginning to be a lot inactive and hard to reach and
he didnt knew much of the situation. I explained and he said yes.
As such, we had new masters,
but with the site, we lost a lot of written documents and
this is also where BoE (Book of Enlightenment) started.
The resurrection of a new and better database.
It wasnt called BoE at the time,
but the format of the documents is very much the same as it is today.
Shan spent a lot of time in the server,
greeting visitors,
recruiting members.
At the time, we recruited instantly without 3-day watches for a long time
to grab a lot of members.
The number of members rised.
I was working with the documents and the website,
I too spent time in the server, but not as much as Shaniz.
Now I do not remember Ben or Zman's role during all of this. I think maybe Zman was in KoF at the time, because he was the VCM before me. As he left, I was given the title.
Ben might have been a master at the time.
It was I who suggested to Yoset that I could need a council assistant to help me,
and Ben became JCA.
well at the time,
only CA.
The council was merged into a 'Unified Council',
where each councilman had max power over all factions.
It's not a healthy system, but it is what we use in situations like that.
There were too few councilors to take on a faction alone.
So,
As we were progressing,
I started to improve the server configurations,
but there was a bug or something with JA+, I dont remember why.
The file banIPs or the file that had player's IP in it were too big.
They were normal,
but the server read them as too big, and the server refused to start.
At the time I didnt know how to fix this or what was causing it.
Im not sure how much access I had to fix it either.
With the server down,
I ordered my own,
Which is the one we have today.
Yoset was unable to help me with the server because he was at the time fully inactive and no possibility to contact him
for months.
With the new server under my name, the Council 'promoted' me to CM.
I ordered a new website that I could fully access from a very good company.
I had the domain afl-clan.com moved to that company, along with the files from the old to the new, but I had to 'sneak' by Yoset kinda to do that.
due to some settings in his profile at the old server company (i had his logins)
I had to change his email to mine so I could confirm the transfer, etc etc.
The new site is what you see today (though it didnt have that 'snowy' layout).
I put it together fast and easy before I had to leave for the military.
Now I know a lot more about web design, though the site won't be fully upgraded until I learn some key elements more.
But this is basically the story.
It sounds kinda smooth,
But it was hard times. Recruiting members, making them stick with us.
Because,
even if we had few,
it would still be a normal clan life where members leave, argue, lie, join etc etc.
But it looks like we pulled through.
So you can look at this this way as I do:
AFL had a totally different life
that almost no one in the clan today
knows about.
the oldest part of AFL is from the times before the hacking.
So this really is a new era.
