At the end of 2004 I was told by an online mate to check out a band called My Chemical Romance. Obviously I did and I liked them instantly. They reminded me of the kind of bands I was really into in ‘96/’97. I surfed around to find information about them, and being a forum-lover I searched for a messageboard I could join. I couldn’t find a decent one though, so in January I started thinking about setting up my own. Although I had experience as a moderator for The Rasmus International Forum, I was a bit apprehensive about managing a forum on my own, so I asked my friend Lisette if she would like to help out. We had talked about setting up a band-forum before, we just hand't found the right band yet. To convince her I played her a few MCR songs. It worked!

After a few weeks of discussing we formed the rules, installed the software and created the colour scheme. And of course we made a pretty smart decision when we bought the domain name. We wanted something easy to find and easy to remember. While we were doing all of this we found out that our mate Rayne [Faerie_Gothmother] was planning to open up a forum for My Chemical Romance as well. We decided to join forces and made her a moderator on ours as soon as we were online. When it comes to managing this forum, Lica and I both have different tasks. Lica pays for the webspace, for example, while I am responsible for the technical side, like installing software updates and sorting out other problems. The difference between being a moderator and an administrator is that mods only have 'powers' in the sections they moderate, while admins can do that everywhere. And of course the admins have to do a lot of behind the scenes stuff that I won't bore you with. So although Lica and I may not always seem to be doing much on the forum, we are working very hard to keep it up and running.

So on March 5th 2007, we celebrated our second anniversary. Well, not really. The board was being moved to a new server, because our old host couldn't handle the 5 million hits we get each month(!), resulting in a lot of downtime. When the move was completed, taking up almost a week of very hard work by the amazing Lica, we also put up a brand new logo and a new colour scheme. We had an official forum party on March 11th 2007.

User count
We officially opened on March 6th 2005. To attract members we posted on a lot of other messageboards. Naturally most of our first users came from The Rasmus International. We were growing nicely, but then we had the brilliant idea to send an email to MCR’s management about our existence. They posted a link to the boards in the news section on the official site on March 10th, having just over 100 members, and what happened then was shocking. Hundreds of people were singing up each day and on March 30th we hit 2000 registered users. It slowed down for a while then, luckily, we reached 2500 on April 25th and 3000 a month later. During the summer the average growth-rate was about 30 people a day. We had another rush of new users when the official site put a link to the board up in the news section a second time, now to the big Forum Interview. More about that later. We celebrated the registry of our 5000th user at the beginning of October 2005 with the first ever forum awards. New awards were held when we hit 10.000 and recently even 15.000 registered users! Bring on the 20.000!

Moderators
With the rapid growth of the forum we had to add more moderators to the team. We already knew Kay [Aleera] and Jess [celestial_angel18] from the The Rasmus International Forum, where Rayne, Lisette and I were fanfiction moderators at that time. Rayne still is by the way, and was recently joined by Kay. We asked Kay to become a mod first, Jess followed shortly after. Being an all female team we figured we needed some male input and invited scary hairy guy Andrew [flamingfejjery] to join us. He did and we had blast on msn together, often having the entire team in conversations late at night. Sadly Andrew and Kristina [w1kd, who joined at the end of March] had to quit their moderating jobs for several reasons later.

My Creative Romance was the largest growing section of the board and needed more attention. We decided to get someone who would be more focussed on that forum and selected Tiff [terebinthia] for that job. We also split My Creative Romance into My Artificial Romance for all the drawings and other artwork, and My Fictional Romance for stories and poems. We had a great team by then, but as we were/are still growing, new mods are always needed. In August we asked Lauren [wastedwish] to help out at Fictional, because you guys are all fanfic-mad! She was later appointed to other forums as well. In September we finally added Anna to the team. Finally, because she had been helping out since day one! Being a mod at The Rasmus International, she knew exactly how things worked and was always posting links when people had opened a double thread or answering questions when someone needed help. We actually wanted to mod her earlier, but because we needed someone for Fictional more than a general mod, we added Lauren first.

Of course we needed a new male on the team when Andrew left. Selecting someone was not an easy task when 96% of all users is female! But we managed in the end and the lovely Jay [jaylau] was asked if he was brave enough to join. Less hair than Andrew, less sarcastic and evil, but a great asset for a whole lot of other reasons! In December we were all busy and with Tiff not being able to come online regularly, we decided we needed not one but two new mods. Selecting them was extremely hard this time, we discussed people for weeks. Heather [mymestupromance] was added as a general mod and story-lover Crystal [SunnysAngel] joined the Fictional team. At the end of their trial period, Heather unfortunately had to resign because it simply took more time than she had initially imagined it would. We were still contemplating if we needed to replace her when our mate Sarah [Wolf], who has also been a moderator at The Rasmus International, announced she had finally been reconnected to the internet after months of absence, and would love to help out. Of course we couldn’t say no to this amazing offer.

During our second year of running the boards, there were several changes in the mod-team. Sarah and Tiffany had to resign, and there were four new additions to the team: Karen (psiprez), Liam (St Jimmy), Mariana (mkiuxcore) and Clare (IfIFallDown). with our ever growing board, we are always on the lookout for new moderators!

Ambassadors
In 2006 we also started the Ambassador project; six users were chosen to represent their part of the world. They welcome new users, show them around on the board and keep an eye on the latest MCR news! The Ambassadors are: Solitary Confinement (Liz) UK, Aradalwen (Chloe) Europe, PunkerKatey (Kate) Australia+, Cheap Whiskey (Mariana) South America, AUsedMatch (Tay) US and sisterto_sleep (Danica) for Canada.

And there you have it: our team! Well, for now.

Forum Interview – Amsterdam, August 31st 2005
Lisette and I had a brilliant idea during the summer: we could do an interview with the band, asking them questions you guys had posted on the board. When we found out they would play in Amsterdam in August, we started to work this idea out and decided to just go for it. It took days before I had gathered enough courage to make the call to the record company! I was nervous as hell! I locked myself into an empty office at work and phoned them. They were very nice, of course, and there was no need to be nervous at all. We talked about MCR, the forum and a couple of other bands. The guy I spoke to loved the interview ideas and would contact me after discussing it with his colleagues.

I was told the good news on August 2nd; we could do a twenty minute interview with the band on the day of the gig! Questions for the band were posted like mad the following weeks. When we made the first selection there were over 200 we had to go through, while we only had time for about 20. We opened a second thread where we posted updates a few days before the big day so you could follow our actions and support us when we got nervous. We initially told we’d be talking to Ray, Bob and Mikey, but when we entered the room Frank was there and Ray was nowhere to be found. He was doing another interview with Gerard at that time for a Dutch magazine. The guys were great and loved the way this interview was done. They even talked the very strict record company lady into having extra time with us so we could do more questions! The gig that evening was amazing too. We were on a high for days! Remember counting down in the thread to the time when we would post the interview? Fun times! You can read the Big Forum Interview here!

Second Forum Interview – Amsterdam, October 13th 2006
When we heard the band would be back in the Netherlands in October, we set up another interview with the band. We were told it would be with Frank, but shortly before it was to take place, we had a call that Bob would join us as well. We were thrilled, of course. But it wasn't Bob who walked through the door, it was our very own afro-man Ray! Again we had a blast, getting the boys to answer questions you had asked your fellow boardies. They expressed how much they loved the forum, resulting in giving us permission to put a seal of approval on the board! Rea all about it here!

You!
All in all it was a great first amd second year. We’ve had so much fun, though there have been stressful moments as well. We never thought we’d ever be this big, but we feel we’ve managed to keep this a friendly place where everyone can enjoy themselves. Thank you all for helping us create this amazing community! Bring on the second year! *massive grouphug*

On behalf of the entire team,

Imre [poison amy]