Miniclip Forum History

This page gives a brief summary of the Miniclip Community year-by-year.

For a more extensive history, see the sub00artucle for each year.

2003
2003 on the Miniclip Forum

The Old Forum was created by Miniclip on the 26th of February 2003 and opened to members on May 1st. A tiny community developed, comprised of fans of early Miniclip Games such as Dancing Bush, 3 Foot Ninja and Heli Attack. AmberMouse became the forum's first moderator that summer owing to her helpful guides and tutorials on many Miniclip games. The Old Forums inactive and obscure, totalling just 1,485 posts by the end of the year.

2004
2004 on the Miniclip Forum

Traffic to the forum steadily increased from the start of 2004 thanks to a forum link being added to every games page, and the community grew. AmberMouse was promoted to the rank of administrator and officially given responsibility for running the forums on behalf on Miniclip. She in turn appointed a handful of moderators to assist her with the growing demands of managing the board. The forum was extremely relaxed during this period and rules were generally taken lightly by staff and members alike. Growth and overall activity doubled the autumn with the addition of the RuneScape and Robot Rage forums,. By the end of 2004 the Old Forum numbered 62000 posts and has established a moderate-sized community.

2005
2005 on the Miniclip Forum

The forum continued to grow into 2005, acellerated further by the addition of the Anagrammatic forum in April. Over the summer and early autumn, with schools and colleges closed, activity spiked and increased as much as five fold, reaching over 50,000 posts per-month. Many members, for years after, would refer to this as the forum's golden period. However, others gradually became frustrated at the high level of spam and off-topic posts, with younger members appearing to use the forums as a personal chat room, derailing threads. Moderation remained lax and little was being done to deal with this problem, to Dracophile and Tetsumonchi took it upon themselves to publicly name and shame spammers in attempt to force them to change their ways. Backed by the staff team, it did have some moderate success. On New Year's Eve eve, Tetsumonchi was voted top member of 2005 in the forum's first Member of the Year competition. By this point, a large and diverse community had been established and the forum numbered some 300,000 posts.

2006
2006 on the Miniclip Forum

Life on the forums continued as normal until March when a forum for the children's game Club Penguin was added. The game was aimed at 6-14 year-olds and over the next few weeks a large number of young children name their way onto the forum. By May, over 23,000 posts had been made in the Club Penguin forum, making it one of the largest discussion boards on the Old Forum. However, the section was a rabble, and the moderation team, including AmberMouse, had become largely inactive. Dracophile, Tetsumonchi and a handful of other members from the mainstream community intervened and posted a series of guides, codes of conduct, and answered questions in an attempt to impose some semblance of order. Dracophile also got in contact with Miniclip's head of web development, Ben to suggest ideas for managing the Club Penguin and in late May was made a moderator and specifically tasked with moderating the Club Penguin section. However, the Club Penguin community continued to grow at an exponential rate and by the end of June its forum contained over 150,000 posts - 30% of the Old Forum's total. With Draco struggling to cope with tackling Club Penguin spam, Tetsumonchi was appointed a moderator to assist him. Dracophile, who had prior knowledge of vBulletin, was made an administrator in July in the hopes that he could use this knowledge to mitigate Club Penguin's spam, but despite their best efforts, spam continued to increase and spread to other areas of the forum as the Penguin community grew and grew. Eventually, members of the mainstream community grew fed up of the spam, claiming it was ruining the forum, and started to leave. Dracophile and Tetsumonchi adopted a toughter approach towards Club Penguin in order to preserve the maintream community, creating a stringent set of rules for Club Penguin and issuing infractions for ANY rule violations whatsoever, declaring the Club Penguin users could either shape up or ship out. After multiple parents complained about their children being booted off the forums, the pair were intructed by Ben to cease this approach, and the spam soon returned to normal. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Draco suggested creating an entirely seperate forum for Club Penguin, before the mainstream Miniclip community had been entirely driven off. Miniclip agreed to the proposal. By the end of the year, despite over 50% of posts within the Club Penguin section having been deleted as spam, the section still accounted for over the half the Old Forum's total of 800,000.

2007
2007 on the Miniclip Forum

Miniclip purchased a second vBulletin forum and Dracophile set to work creating the new home for the Club Penguin community. Miniclip Club Penguin or MCCP for short opened in March and the Club Penguin section on the Old Forum was closed a few days later. While MCCP got off to booming start, with members competing to see who could get the highest post count, the Old Forum was left desolated. Club Penguin's spam had chased many of the mainstream community away, leaving only a core of dedicated veterans and a few dozen former Club Penguin players who felt they had outgrown the game. While some semblance of normality returned to the forum, activity remained low and gradually decreased over the course of the year. With Dracophile spending more and more time on MCCP, Tetsumonchi largely managed the forums from day to day, with the assistance of new mods Scootz and Spike16. The relative inactivity was punctuated with several disputes with the staff team, who who generally experienced lower popularity during this period.

2008
By the end of the year the Old Forum numbered 2,066,644 posts.

2009
By the end of the year the Old Forum numbered 2.789,367 posts.

2010
By the end of the year the Old Forum numbered approximately 3,536,669 posts.

2011
By the end of the year the Old Forums are estimated to have numbered approximately 4,000,000 posts.

2012
At the time of their closure, the Old Forums are estimated to have numbered approximately 4,250,000 posts.

The Fan Forums numbered approximately 14,000 posts at the end of the year.

2013
The Fan Forums numbered approximately 72,000 posts at the end of the year.

2014
The Fan Forums numbered approximately 94,400 posts at the end of the year.

2015
The Fan Forums numbered approximately 116,000 posts at the end of the the year.

2016
The Fan Forums numbered approximately 122,000 posts at the end of the the year.

2017
The Fan Forums numbered approximately 133,500 posts at the end of the the year.

2018
The Fan Forums numbered approximately 195,500 posts by October of the that year.