Originally Posted by Halx

ok children.. gather 'round and I'll tell you a story. The story of TFP. It's not really spectacular, but it's what you asked for.

So, a long time ago, I created a gaming clan called TBA. We played Unreal Tournament Instagib, and (maybe I'm gloating) we were the best! Well, at least we were in Team Deathmatch. Undefeated. SO ANYWAYS, since I've got my bragging out of the way, here's the important stuff. We had our own message board. It resided at tba-ownz.org and it was created so our bad-ass members could hang out and be rowdy away from the main community message board, which was censored and full of stupid IRC-like sillyness. We called that board 'Disneyland' and so in contrast, we called our board 'This Aint Disneyland, Bitch!' Our board consisted of 4 main sections... General Discussion, Titty Board... Amen (TBA), Ownage Board, and something else that I forget. Time went on, and as gaming usually goes, things got really dramatic around our clan. I think we broke up and reformed 3 times in 2 years. Eventually we all couldn't stand eachother - every single clan in the community had at least 1 former TBA member and so every match we'd play, there was animosity flying all over the place. I called it quits on the gaming, and the clan dissolved.

So months after the dissolution, I sat there with an empty message board. I renamed it the Tilted Forum Project (I didn't like the name at first, but I wanted to name it SOEMTHING else.) Nobody came around anymore except for ZeroCool, so it was pretty much a barren landscape. I had been visiting a site (you might have heard of it) called Fark.com and I had a little urge to put a link up... to what I did not know. So it hit me, I have a Titty Board. Fark has boobies links. A match made in heaven. I went into Fark's irc channel and hung out one Sunday morning (Jan 20, 2002), and I asked one of the moderators if they'd post a boobies link for me. They took a loot at my site, asked me if the server could handle it, and I said sure. So I submitted the Titty Board link and they accepted it. Incoming traffic!

So for the rest of that day, I was updating the Titty Board like mad, to keep the people happy. A few peeps registered and posted a few pictures of their own - that was the idea. Time went on, and more and more people kept visiting through Fark... so many in fact that we ended up busting into the top 25 boobies links page.

Ok, I had all this free traffic, all coming for free boobies. That's great, but I knew I wanted more than that. I had no more online community to hang out with because I had left gaming. I figured I'd create one for myself.

What do I want out of a community? Well, after seeing first hand what happens when you let people run rampant, I came to realize that I really didn't enjoy being caught in all that animosity. I wanted to feel safe enough to share my feelings and have people share theirs with me. With that idea in mind, I created a few rules that I sought to enforce, and I started using some tactics to siphon people away from the Titty Board, into the general discussion area.

Who would have known it? Porn surfers are just like anyone else. Before I created this site, I would have told you that porn surfers were a bunch of shady delinquents who have dirty vocabularies and hairy palms. I have learned a lot since then.

So, the TFProject has had 5 different hosts, with 3 complete rebuilds. I estimate we've processed about 100K people and over a million posts. There are a few message boards that are larger and more popular, but that only means my job isn't done yet.