The Internet has changed the way we do things beyond all recognition, we now gain instant information, get work and make friends, sometimes without ever meeting the client or the friend.
When video production and editing started to move away from the confines of the broadcast domain, the Internet was in it's infancy and magazines were the medium of the day, attracting readers with articles and tutorials, equipment reviews and of course, adverts from the emerging supply companies all keen to attract business from this new breed of 'videographers'.
One of the first of these magazines was Computer Video, it carried an informative (and sometimes controversial!) editorial, reviews of the latest cameras, information and reviews of the new 'non linear' way of video editing using a computer along with tutorial articles. Magazines are informative but they are always between 4 and 6 weeks out of date by the time they hit the shelves, the editor of Computer Video saw the Internet was going to change the way we did things and setup an 'online' forum where users could get up to date information, ask other members for help and advice - with an almost instant response method and, for it to become, 'the place to go' for the many people now producing and editing with this new affordable video technology. I signed up in 1999 and have been a regular reader and contributor since apart for a short period when I got banned and then re-instated (a long story).
The DVDoctor forum soon attracted a wide range of readers - amateurs, part-timers, professionals and retired industry professionals, information and advice was freely dispensed, friendships forged and work between members obtained. Sadly the magazine was not so successful and eventually it was pulled by the publisher much to the annoyance of it's readers (but that's another long story!). The forum also suffered - it was hit by a hardware failure and much of the archives were lost, it rose from the ashes and went on to become a hugely successful forum well known around the world.
Come forward to January 2012, the forum was hit by a hacker attack and went down, after a couple of days, a notice went up advising of the attack and that work was going on behind the scenes to bring the forum back. It's taken around 4 weeks so far and now the old DVDoctor forum is back up and running using a totally different forum software front end. I know and understand that many hours of hard work, late nights, takeaways and cans of Red Bull have gone into the revamp by people unpaid for their efforts but there's a couple of things I don't understand. The previous vBulletin based software was known to be vulnerable and updates were issued to prevent these hack attacks but don't appear to have been implemented on the old DVDoctor site, the vBulletin software is successfully used elsewhere on the web, if a backup of the forum data was available as it seems to have been, why was the vBulletin software not updated and then restored from backups? - as it is, there is now a forum design that most users hate, software bugs and glitches that are going to take months if not years to sort out and the result is that many, many users have now moved on to other forums or are not bothering to visit the DVDoctor forum at all.
I don't think it'll ever recover to it's former glory, so sadly I've also moved on, DVDoctor has been a great help to me over the years, I had work from members, made friends I'll stay in touch with and I'll be able to say I was part of it, when it was the place to see and be seen.
UPDATE 7/3/12
It looks like the site now has the services of a 'Drupal Guru', some major improvements have been made and it's beginning to look and feel a lot more 'usable' - maybe a Phoenix can rise twice!
