Serious Business Elitist Forums
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http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/
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Description
Serious Business Elitist Forums, or concisely known as Serious Business, is an alternative location for the Gamingforce community to socialize. Major differences include different vBulletin features, Bigblah as owner and head admin, complete absence of bobo, a smaller number of boards, and a general abatement of faceless leechers.
History
On February 14th, 2006 (or 13th, depending on your time zone), Bigblah created a phpBB-based forum entitled "Gamingforce Temporary Forums" (GFTF for short). It was conceived as a place to socialize in lieu of GFF, which crashed four days earlier. While other members have created alternative forums in the past, none have been nearly as successful in assembling the community.
Located on the condign.org domain with hosting provided by DreamHost (just like GFWiki), GFTF had ample room for malleability and growth. Nearly 100 members joined immediately, and over time, more members decided to join as they grew impatient with the long wait for GFF's return. Furthermore, the staff at these forums closely matched that of GFF, given the community was all the same. With Bigblah at the helm, the forum underwent a large visual change in a relatively short amount of time. By the end of this period, the forums' appearance closely matched that of GFF, notwithstanding the gap between phpBB and vBulletin. Also during this metamorphosis, more boards were added as necessary, and as requested by the community.
One of the boards, "New GFF", was created to discuss the future of the community. While there was much talk about breaking off from bobo and Gamingforce, amongst other things, by late February, it became known that the return of GFF was inevitable. It was around this time that Bigblah stated the following (http://www.condign.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2920#2920):
For all those who's been clamouring for a break from dependency on bobo -- considering that GFF is about the "community" as you say, we can very well do away with the filesharing forum with the faceless leechers, and the sheet music forum with the traders who don't come out of their niche. That cuts down a substantial portion of the population as well as bandwidth required to run the boards. In that case, will we even need a entire dedicated machine for this? Can't we just run this on a shared hosting plan as it is now?
I'll be back at GFF when bobo and Miles get it back up, but I'll still be maintaining this site. Throw a couple of responses into the new forum name proposal thread, I'll fix up the banner, and you can have your forum.
Have doubts whether it will survive? Well, it's no different if you go out and buy a new dedicated server and a vBulletin license.
And thus, effective on February 27th, the "Gamingforce Temporary Forums" became the Serious Business Elitist Forums; spiffy logo and all.
On March 2nd, 2006, Gamingforce returned, and the activity level at Serious Business dropped drastically. However, this lack of activity allowed Bigblah to experiment with forum software to a greater degree of freedom. Then, on March 19, 2006, Bigblah opened up a vBulletin version of Serious Business at the gamingforce.org domain, which replaced the old phpBB version. All users, threads, and posts were carried over and converted to be used in vBulletin. The forum titles and descriptions also underwent further changes to differentiate themselves from their GFF counterparts.
After the March 29, 2007 crash, activity at Serious Business increased dramatically.
The Name
The forum name "Serious Business" was first mentioned by Beginner in #newgff, and was praised and embellished upon by many members, including Crash Landon. It should be noted that the name is actually based off of the popular Internet meme, "THE INTERNET IS SERIOUS BUSINESS". While this name was intended to be used in the event of a new forum created to break away from bobo, that plan never saw any physical progress. Thus, later on, Bigblah used the name for his own forums, which had already been established as an alternative nexus of the Gamingforce community.
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