(let me know if the title needs to be better)

Here is what Halie Satanus posted, minus the YouTube videos, you can view the original post here.

Quote Originally Posted by Halie Satanus View Post
Well there's a thing..

In my time in Hex I was lucky enough to be able to badger harasses (and manipulate) a lot of members into helping me. It worked like this, I'd have an idea and punt it to a few good people and they would take it and turn it into something workable. A lot of what we achieved back then was down to others chewing it up and coming back with what they thought would work. In that respect I owe a lot to Mak/Mon/Aradan/Gigagia/Publius/Hader/Goscinio/Spirit of Rob/Lusted/MCM/Meg/Sim/Foot/Trajan/Muizer/Agreas/Ciaus/Sheep and of course Prof as well as the many teams Chiv/Arthurian/Heg/RTR/EB/ROP/RS/XGM/The Lords ect ect ect, who all contributed to those discussions and times, there are many who I'm sure I've forgotten to mention (6 years is a dam long time).... Of course being myself, sometimes I would ignore them and stick to my ideas but generally it would be a joint effort.

A lot of you weren't around then and I guess to understand why what we did back then was important you'd need to understand TWC's position in the TW/modding world. Without dragging up long dead battles and arguments (most of which were long before my time). TWC's modding community had fallen by the way side. There were a handful of dedicated modders here in the workshop but if you wanted to do any serious modding you went to the Org. Another thing worth noting is pretty much the entire TWC forums were on the main index. What was needed was an overhaul and the community needed to be rebuilt. I was asked by Asterix/Ian/Tac, under the watchful eye of Archer, to formulate a council of modders (CoW) and put forward plans for a forum restructure which we did, it wasn't very good, disaster even. What we learned though was what definitely wasn't good which gave us ideas for what might work.

Time moved on and I served a short period as a moderator (we wore green in those days). Then came Ian's take over, I'd quit staff during the conflict (because Prof had been banned for speaking out against Besim).. Any way, I guess I'd been doing something right because Ian asked me to join Hex and run the TW. The community side had started to pick up but was still a very poor second to the Org. So I set about building the community here and restructuring the TW forums. The sticking point as far as restructuring goes was that Sim didn't want a ton of forums on the main index, so sub forums had to be created. This is where I threw the discussion open to the community. The restructure took awhile and wasn't fully met with joy and thanks. A lot of people hated the layout and complained about having to click into 3/4 sub forums!! Still, it was cleaner and gave us a good basis.

All the while the community had started to drift back here, slowly. MTW2 was on the horizon or had just come out (I forget) and the sudden influx of new members was coming thick and fast, so we set up the MTW2 forums based on the same format as Rome, oddly, people seemed to like it. The goal then was to draw in mods and get them hosted, I'd also roped Publius into Hex to help me (he was invaluable). We set up a forum in the Modd Comm forums away from hex and were we could discuss mods threads and keep an eye on their progress. We also, with community input, set very clear criteria for hosting mods it had got to a stage where we could pick and chose those we thought were going to succeed and those who weren't. Sounds harsh but we wanted people who came here to be impressed by our (TWC's) roaster. The idea was simple, good hosted mods will attract other good mods.

I had previously set up the modding register, that might have been prior to Hex, I don't recall. Something that took a lot of time was interceding in disputes, especially with older mods were teams had become fractured or simply changed hands over time. the registry became our go to policy for such disputes as mods had to sign up to it in order to get a hosted forum. Once permissions of mod usage was recorded we had a foot to stand on in disputes. I recall a very long night corresponding with a guy who had claimed ownership of a mod (Hegemonia) which was being disputed, he only spoke French and while I can order a milky cofffee with two sugars (Un Caffay O'Lay Du Sucra SeeFoo Play Garsun) communication was strained. I think we sorted it though (banned him and his mod from ever coming here). At some point I snuck in the classifieds forum and the modders profiles as well as the first historical research centre (for ETW) and the modd comm forums, which while they don't get a lot of traffic served a lot of purposes over the years..

All the while myself and Publius were building up relationships with modders all over over the internet, I must have joined every TW modding fan forum there was, and there were a fair few back then. Often I was met with suspicion due to what had happened in the past but with a bit of charm and badgering our reputation started to raise. I think people began to notice the things we were doing and the amount of effort we were putting into protecting modders and giving them as much say as possible in what we did.

Things I didn't do.

I served with Gigagia at a time when content was a gleam in his eye, I won't say I was instrumental in setting that up because I really wasn't, myself Giga and Prof would discuss it on msn but tbh, I kept telling Giga (in the nicest way possible) to do it himself and stop badgering me (though I encouraged him a lot). I guess he saw what we'd been doing with the TW and realised content could be different too. The University was another of Giga's ideas, though myself and Prof were instrumental in it's inception, I wouldn't take any credit for that either. Shame really, I always wanted one of those cool Lebowski medals..

Any how..

Was there more, yeh, a lot more. I was involved in a lot of Hex goings on, though I never really wanted to be and would often swerve discussion, especially moderating and tech which always took up more time than I wanted to give or had a Winnie the Pooh about. For me it was all about the TW and what we could do, we had long term plans and ideas and just needed people to buy into them. Which by hook or by crook they did.

It would be remiss of me to claim I did anything that hadn't been done or at least tried before. I learned a lot from Archer in terms of getting things done and from Ian/Garb/Asterix/Tac in terms of presenting ideas to others, Tac in particular had a unique way of refusing to take no for an answer, GTF!.

Lastly but far from least. Garb. To say I owe a lot to Garb, not just in term of TWC but life in general would be an understatement.

Remember kids, wash yer balls.

Oh and one last last thing.. Cheers Ishy..