About this website

History

Back in 2004, I (age 15) and Gyarnoc (age 16) were sitting in class and thought about the idea of having a heavily visited website. The only way we thought this could be done, was to create a website for a game, that was not yet released. We immedietly searched the internet and find out the upcoming Elder Scrolls game: Oblivion. We both played Morrowind in the past and were excited to see a sequel upcoming. That day, we registered the Oblivionsource.com domain name. We started to code the website right away.

There was only one problem: we never used a programming language for a dynamic website before. Fortunately, we had some programming experience in C and C++ and experience in using HTML. We chose PHP and MySQL as the golden combination in development. However, the first version of Oblivion Source was, as I recall, butt-ugly. It was canceled. The second version was already a big improvement. We also started up a forum and a file library for Oblivion. What we didn't know was that the game wouldn't be released for another year...

Nonetheless, visitors were pooring in and the forums quickley passed the (then) magical 100 registered members. In the meantime, we had changed the website two times and were now running a fourth version. I recall a member saying: "Are you going to change the website every two weeks from now on?". During the approach of the release of Oblivion, the forums got more than 1000 registered members. And then came the big day: at the day of the launch, we had 60,000 unique visitors on one single day. We even managed to crash our old webserver, which was running in America. After the release, we got about a steady 20,000 unique visitors a day. It didn't took long, before we passed the magical 1,000,000 visits and 100,000 downloads mark.

But with this amount of visitors, you also get spammers... When we created the website 2 years earlier (as noobs), we didn't take any measures against spammers. Unfortunately there were a lot of them. Where the forums were greatly managed by the moderators, the file library got a big mess (I really should have built in some moderating stuff). In June 2007, the game was over for the main site and we took everything offline, except for the forums. We updated the forums to phpBB version 3 and I started developing the fifth (current) website.

The main problem for this development was time. Around July 2007 I was starting up my own company with another high school friend. This took all little free time I had left. At the beginning of 2008, when everything was going smooth and easy, I restarted the development of Oblivion Source. The end result is what you see here today. Not even have I completely remade the website and it's systems, you can now even do more stuff, easier! Writing (sub)comments, reviews, tutorials, news items are great new additions. By using AJAX methods, you can even access the site faster and rank files and comment on stuff without reloading the page.

Also, the website is running on a webserver I can fully administrate myself. It's connected to the internet in the Sig Telehousing datacenter at the Zernike Science park here in Groningen, which is 15 minutes away by bicycle. It's even a 2 minute walk from my college school! So don't worry if something ever happends to the website, I'll race as fast as I can if the remote desktop is broken ;)

The new Oblivion Source's website is programmed in ASP.net 2.0 in the C# language. It's systems have been divided into several layers. At present time, the websites is made up by 14,000 lines of code, making up 29 programming classes in the Business Logic Layer and 13 tables in the Data Access Layer.

I really hope you will love the new website and hope to get some feedback from you!

Kind regards,