Emmie
04-09-2009, 09:08 PM
I know, I know, I'm the site administrator. But the forum just opened, so we're all more or less new, right?
A few weeks ago I was remembering how most of my friends back in 2002 / 2003 were also pretty into the LOTR films and how fun it was to obsess over them together, and just have something to anticipate every December for three years. And at the time I joined and posted on communities like RingQuest (no longer online) and The One boards (not active these days), and enjoyed that a lot, even though I never got incredibly active on them.
But I got to thinking that it won't be all that long before the Hobbit movies are released. So I started looking for existing LOTR communities I could join to *squee* about various pieces of information as they were released... whereupon I realized that there really weren't any like what I was looking for.
I did look through a lot of forums, but none were really ideal:
I couldn't find even one forum that was specifically set up to discuss the upcoming Hobbit movies, and many of the LOTR forums I looked at were more focused on the books than the films (although I certainly hope we can talk about both here).
Many used to be active but are almost abandoned these days. (Many more were never active.)
Most of them weren't powered by vBulletin. I'm sure many people don't pay attention to the software used to power the forum, but vBulletin can do a pretty significant number of things that nothing else can; some of them large things and others just improve the user experience in miscellaneous little ways that you nevertheless end up growing attached to - the only reason vBulletin isn't used more is that you have to pay for a license and it isn't cheap.
I had a lot of experience running websites and forums from creating numerous Harry Potter fan sites, back when the series was an obsession of mine, so I decided I would start my own Hobbit-related forum. And that's the story behind the site.
Other than Lord of the Rings books and movies I'm quite interested in books in general, in just about any genre - and I love writing and art and photography and other creative things. Feel free to PM me, contact me on MSN/AIM if I happen to be on and/or add me to your hobbitforums.com friends list. :)
A few weeks ago I was remembering how most of my friends back in 2002 / 2003 were also pretty into the LOTR films and how fun it was to obsess over them together, and just have something to anticipate every December for three years. And at the time I joined and posted on communities like RingQuest (no longer online) and The One boards (not active these days), and enjoyed that a lot, even though I never got incredibly active on them.
But I got to thinking that it won't be all that long before the Hobbit movies are released. So I started looking for existing LOTR communities I could join to *squee* about various pieces of information as they were released... whereupon I realized that there really weren't any like what I was looking for.
I did look through a lot of forums, but none were really ideal:
I couldn't find even one forum that was specifically set up to discuss the upcoming Hobbit movies, and many of the LOTR forums I looked at were more focused on the books than the films (although I certainly hope we can talk about both here).
Many used to be active but are almost abandoned these days. (Many more were never active.)
Most of them weren't powered by vBulletin. I'm sure many people don't pay attention to the software used to power the forum, but vBulletin can do a pretty significant number of things that nothing else can; some of them large things and others just improve the user experience in miscellaneous little ways that you nevertheless end up growing attached to - the only reason vBulletin isn't used more is that you have to pay for a license and it isn't cheap.
I had a lot of experience running websites and forums from creating numerous Harry Potter fan sites, back when the series was an obsession of mine, so I decided I would start my own Hobbit-related forum. And that's the story behind the site.
Other than Lord of the Rings books and movies I'm quite interested in books in general, in just about any genre - and I love writing and art and photography and other creative things. Feel free to PM me, contact me on MSN/AIM if I happen to be on and/or add me to your hobbitforums.com friends list. :)