In the beginning there was nothing. Nothing here, anyways. A group of Proboards roleplay forums existed, each with ideas and concepts that deserved better than the inactivity they recieved. The idea for a merger, a war between forums that would encompass all the ideas and storylines and tie them together went around, and was well recieved. The project launched in November of 2004 and the roleplay was officially opened shortly after, on December 3rd.
 
Things were a little chaotic at first, but a geocities page was made and then a single Proboards forum where the respective communities would come together. At first, each of the administrators of the original forums were given administrator status on the new collective forum, but particarpation for some began to wane and another dropped out of the project completely. In time, a faction system was established, and the active posters and contributors organized into the two larger factions, Destiny and Damnation.
For a time, "Destiny versus Damnation" was competing with "Forumwar" as a name for the roleplay. Things were running fairly well, enthusiasm and activity were high, the somewhat inept head administrator beginning to learn to cut and paste simple pre-made Proboards codes for desired effects. The forum width was set to Forumwar's present standard of 650 pixels, category and titlebar images, a background, menubuttons, scrollbar colors, and a logo image were created for the first time in an attempt at skinning.
As time went on, inactive staff and roleplay characters were weeded out and the consistent players were gearing up for the first big clash between the two large factions. Likewise, the appearance of the forum became cleaner and steadier as the "metal" skin was designed, and the head administrator was growing less inept each day as he learned basic HTML and began working to organize things into tables. The domain "Forumwar.net" was purchased, effectively deciding the project's name, and an affiliate exchange began with other budding Proboards forums.
In August of 2005, a short-lived "Corruption" skin was created, largely to test the limits of what sort of skins were possible with the head administrator's expanded knowledge of HTML. Images were made to align with each other and disguise the seams between images, giving the forum a more uniform look. Largely, this was an ugly, short-lived skin, but the fan-made Evanescence font used in it was used in nearly every succeeding skin.
Shortly after the "Corruption" skin, the clean skin was created, using a simple black/gray gradient to make images, simple, fast-loading sets that tiled seamlessly across the page. This is also when the head administrator began to dabble in CSS and managed to align background images of leaves for the fall version. In late September we launched our own RPG directory to help other roleplay forums grow, and we hope to one day coordinate wars between forums as a mean to promote activity and expand communities.
In early March of 2006, Forumwar moved from Proboards to our own server and registered as a business. It took quite a while for the head-admin to familiarize himself with MySQL databases, Phpbb, and working in directories, and so for a short period we used for our forums a pre-made Solaris skin. The forum change hit the roleplay pretty hard, we lost some good members, but with a lot of work we got things back on track for the second Forumwar story arc.
It wasn't long before a Forumwar skin compatible with phpbb was developed, and an HTML template for other pages followed suit. Forumwar appeared at conventions with a booth (Selling just anime merchandise so far, we've hardly our foot in the door of con-going), got quite a few character and starship artworks commissioned and organized into a gallery, and got back on our feet from the brutal switch to our own provider. Just recently the static HTML pages were switched to PHP, some cosmetic changes to the menu have gone about, and we have our own logo image that we stick on everything we can think to.
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