***I wrote the following, when the Charmed Sons board closed in 2014***
I was more or less with TCS right from the beginning in 2005. When Lisa and Donna set up the first TCS board at Yuku (or EZBoards, as it was then called), was quickly part of the staff. It was there that I met a group of people I could call online friends.
However, it wasn't long before I encountered my first bump in the road. For some reason I have long since forgotten, Lisa and Donna insisted that to be part of the TCS staff, you HAD to participate in some stupid interactive game. A game I had zero interest in. Lisa eventually e-mailed me and more or less gave me an ultimatum: Contribute to the game or resign from the TCS staff. Not like having a gun pointed at my head, I resigned right then and there. However, the game was eventually abandoned for some reason, and it wasn't long before I was back on the staff.
Then came the second bump in the road. Yuku was the victim of a massive hacker attack. Many boards were virtually wiped out, TCS included. Realizing that Yuku had let them down, Lisa and Donna moved operations over to the second TCS board, and most of us went along.
Then came the third bump in the road, caused by that damned flash forward scene in Forever Charmed. Yep, you guess it, Mystery Girl. This character that appeared for less than ten seconds, and had no lines, caused major fights (as to whether she was Piper's daughter or not). Donna almost quit because of this incident, which came to be called the Melinda Fallout.
However, as the years passed, interest gradually waned. Staff members began to bail out. Towards the end, I was one of the last staff member who still went there on a regular basis. Even Lisa and Donna began to appear less and less.
By 2009, Lisa decided it was time to move on. She handed the board over to a new Admin. This Admin then shut down that board and set up the Proboards TCS one. Most of us who were left migrated over there. The Admin appointed two Global Moderators, me and another prominent member.
2009 was the year a new member called Betty Newbie joined. At that time, I had no idea how much an impact she would have on my involvement in Charmed Online Fandom.
For a while, things went well. It was as 2010 went on, that things began to go south. One member became more and more militant, whenever we suggested that the time was long past, this person would throw tantrums, saying that we were "giving up". It was late 2010 that this member deleted their account and would not be seen at TCS again for several months.
Of course, things really went to Hell when another member, let's just call her The Queen, who had been absent since the second TCS board was shut down, reared her ugly head. This person had this habit of derailing threads and starting fights. I found myself having to step in more and more often when The Queen started stirring up trouble, locking threads and deleting posts. It seemed my main job at that time was putting out all those fires.
Of courser, by then the campaign was on life support and Betty Newbie made the Should We Change The Board thread which, of course, led to what would be called the Big Fight. I started to make some changes to the TCS board. One change was to create a sub-forum for my Rex and Hannah Chronicles stories. Of course, the aforementioned Queen made a mountain out of this mole hill, and all but accused me of turning TCS into Rex and Hannah Central. The TCS Admin was a good friend of the Queen and, no doubt on her complaints (which I was later able to confirm) fired me (although I remained a member of the TCS board). When Betty Newbie saw how unfair I'd been treated, she deleted her TCS account for good.
Of course, Betty then set up Glued To The Screen (then called Casa Halliwell), and I joined as a Global Moderator, a position I hold to this day (I have since moved up to Admin).
Meanwhile, back at TCS, then came the "let's be nice" policy that squelched all the fun out of the board (the member who had deleted their account a few months back reappeared around this time). The Admin decided to make the staff a bureaucracy, a bunch of Mods that basically had no power to act if a troublemaker showed up. They could sticky and lock threads, but could not delete or move posts (one of them actually explained this to me). Basically, a troll could have strolled right in and wreaked all sorts of havoc and the Mods would have been powerless to put a stop to it.
To complicate matters further, the one remaining Global Moderator resigned and was never replaced. The Admin herself, who was AWOL most of the time, soon vanished as well (two years would pass before she logged in again). The only two people who could actually do anything against trolls and spammers were now gone.
Of course, in the long run, it didn't matter. The board gradually dried up and died. Even most of the Mods no longer bothered to show up (except one, and this person was literally the last one standing until the bitter end).
When I terminated my TCS account in January of 2013, I formally ended nearly a decade of involvement. I knew the campaign was finished, and felt it was time for me to move on.
Now the board itself is gone. However, the memories, good and bad, remain.
The Charmed Sons: 2005-2014
R.I.P.
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