I don't know how well that worked, but at some point in time Jolt came into the picture. Rendelius paid the server fees and tried to earn some money by selling adverts. The end result was that it didn't take too long to check out the new (public available) posts for a day. We had quite a strict policy, even more strict than what we have now, which resulted in bans, warnings and other moderation actions that drove the number of public posts even further down. The second reason was the moderation policy. This drove the number of public visible posts down. Some people only spent time in their group forum. What happened was that people spent more time in their dedicated group forums than they did in the rest of the forum. These groups were one of the two main reasons that the RPGDot forums became a somewhat desolated place. Several groups were founded, with the biggest group being the Non-flamer's Guild. The RPGDot forums were a place that was reasonably well visited and at some time we decided that it would be a good idea to create user groups and provide those groups a space on the forums that was only visible to the members of that group. In any case this kept us going until 2006. So some sites only functioned as a filter of news and articles, similar to our current indie site. Most of these sites also had at least one person posting news and articles for that site, but news posted on RPGDot would also be automatically visible on hosted sites when it was applicable for them. Next to that we also had a site dedicated to adventures and a site dedicated to MMORPGs. The best known ones were the Gothic and Arx Fatalis sites. Any game of some substance had its own hosted site at RPGDot. This allowed us to create different skins, which we used a lot for the hosted sites we had, of which there were plenty. The year after that I redesigned the whole thing and separated the controller part from the view part. This actually meant that we only had one design and it would be really problematic to make design changes to it, but it was working. This first version was written in PHP, but had the layout embedded in the PHP files. I don't even recall what we used for that, but it wasn't that great, so in 2001, a guy named Stijn, Garrett and me worked on creating a new design from scratch creating our own CMS. I'm not sure when exactly, but at some point in 2000, Rendelius was looking for people to post news for RPGDot and I applied for that position, finding myself posting news after that. At the time I was operating The Locus Inn, which was focusing on Infinity Engine games (some more and some less in detail). Next to running RPGDot, Rendelius was also running a hosting service on BlinkingDot, where people could get their site hosted for free, by placing some ads on their site. Myrthos: Here is some of my history with RPGDot and the start of RPGWatch. The RPGWatch is 15 years old these days! The successor of RPGDot started in October 2006 and here's Myrthos' story of the beginning.