Hello there.

The Odyssey of Hyrule was directly inspired by the original ZHQ. If you look in the letters pages from 1996 you can find a rather insane letter by a young Video Gamer X.

And we're indeed still around. Against all odds.

...There was also HTLOZ back then, give credit where it was due. And Ice's Zelda Central but I know nothing about that place.

Falco X turned out alright. Married Zerofoxie. Has a small Mexican gaming blog. VGX... now there's a story.

I did a little digging for you. Didn't check when you were made a mod/smod yet, but you were an admin from February 21st 2010 to August 14th 2010.

Oh, just found the rest!

Panique

Graphics Design Mod: July 2008 - Oct. 2008
Community Section Mod: Oct. 2008 - Nov. 2008
Super Mod: Nov. 2008 - Feb. 2010
Admin: Feb. 2010 - Aug. 2010

It was all in the old Mod history thread. Don't know why you were disappeared from history, but you're back.

Edit: Do you know when you retired as a smod? Because I can add your 2nd stint as a smod too.

hi max!

who is joshua?

So this is where you've been hiding. Always the last place you expect.

You been good?

Max tagged a few people in on FB, that's how I ended up here.

Joshua is Yumil, the webmaster of Temple of Time/Zelda Relic. He ran one of the Zelda Wiki mastermind websites and eventually became staff here.

We have a few other Zelda site webmasters currently in leadership staff positions here. @Shona went by Lysia and ran The Sacred Realm. @The Missing Link hasn’t changed his username, he ran Zelda Blog. @Elias Thompson I don’t remember if he had an old username but him and the other staff of Zelda Eternity moved here.

This is quite a family reunion here.

Ah ok.

Nearly everyone has changed nicks and I have no idea who's who any more.

So I guess I remember ZU when everybody went by different names.

I was Zottie for a long time, and then thumiza. I basically joined ZU because I was so salty over getting banned from a forum that I spent two years on getting 7k+ posts as an administrator, because I was undoubtedly a nuisance. The most amount of social media moderation I've done since then is some website coding and formating, and adminning a couple of chat servers.

lord-of-shadow wrote:

Speaking of still alive - it is a goddamn miracle that the forum user database is still intact. This system remembers my join date. Goddamn. Well done, everyone who's worked on that over the years.

​Our forum's had some database problems in the past and vBulletin had a nightmare breakdown back in 2014 that took a couple of months of data with it but considering what it's been through over 16 years of forums and more than one forum software change it's doing well for itself.

@'F3' Hi! I think Cody already introduced me well enough. It's nice to see you.

Well, Cody told me to rattle off some more facts in the thread, and I gotta keep up the illusion that I work for him and do whatever he tells me to, so here we go.

So, here's a couple personal stories.

• I merged Zelda Relic into Zelda Dungeon in 2009. I worked with Mases for a while, and then took a short hiatus. I suck at not working on a website, so I made a little Wordpress blog to write up some game reviews and opinion articles; this was 2011. It wasn't long before Zelda came up, but I didn't want to publish it for my audience of 0 people. So, I asked Cody if I could publish a guest article (something I had done previously during my "hiatus"...now that I think about it, it really wasn't much of one).
  
  Anyone who knows Cody knows that he is super mean. He refused to published my article unless I joined the staff. So...here we are 7 years later.
  
  
• I almost shared this last night and then decided against it, but I guess I'll go ahead and share it. So, I'm into web design - who knew - but I've been getting a little rusty and started some projects to practice all the new shiny things going on.
  
  So, the other day, a conversation with some of the other ZU team leaders led me down memory lane, and I started looking at the old ZU page layouts...and I thought it might be fun to recreate one of them using more modern web design tools (i.e. not a bunch of tables nested inside of tables and optimized for Internet Explorer 5). So...I did. I rebuilt one of the oldest ZU layouts (the oldest one we can easily find) - Version 3. It's in a hidden directory on my personal blog: www.watcherjoshua.com/zu3/index.html
  
  It's not finished yet. I want to make a mobile layout, but the pieces are mostly there. I spent a couple hours on it last weekend, and I'm going to work on it again as soon as I get some more free time.
  
  
• And, I thought it would be fun to post some links to old sites that are still online, but that have not been mentioned yet. So, here's a handful. Zelda Universe keeps a list of Zelda websites with notes about which ones are online, offline, active, inactive, etc.
  
  Brotherhood of the Underworld
  The Desert Colossus
  Zelda Elements
  Zelda Oracles
  Zelda Capital
  Rauru's Return
  
  Related: While pulling those links, I had to update the status of a couple websites. Exploding Deku Nut is now completely offline. And Zelda Infinite now redirects to zelda.com.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Lord of Shadow, I recognize you from htloz! You were waxing nostalgic about zelda fansites even in 2005.

TGA seems to be a common thread connecting us. I was tangentially involved in their forums and I'm still in contact with a couple of the regulars.

Yeah. It really is somewhat miraculous considering all the mishaps over the years. Lost backups, database corruption. The last redesign (when this latest Temple skin was launched) caused the forums to be down for months. The reason? We were trying to convert the database from vBullitin to Burning Board and it literally took 3 or 4 months. The transfer itself took about 4 days, but every time it ran into an error, it stopped the whole thing. Then, we had to fix the problem and try again...and then it would stop again after 3 days. It was a nightmare.

We're always looking for Features Writers

Speaking of publishing articles, there was a very brief period of time when I was a ZU staff writer. I mostly stopped because my status was lost due to some server mishap or another and I never got around to asking for it to be reinstated. Now the interesting thing is that as a staff member, I was able to see the staff boards—until I was banned from them without ever even posting in them because just the thought of me being able to see them made someone so uncomfortable they complained to Liah about it.

I went by the username Lysia in the Zelda community from 2000 until 2013, when I switched to my real name. I ran a Zelda fan site from 2001 - 2011, when I merged with Zelda Universe, so I've actually been webmastering for nearly 17 years :O My site changed name a few times over the years: The Legend, Legends and Adventure, and finally The Sacred Realm. It had a large collection of fan works, one of the larger forums in the community (Legends Place), and was also known for promoting the fan film The Hero of Time in the community between 2006 - 2009.

I was active in a few other communities in the 2000s. I was a staff member at kasuto.net where I updated the site occasionally, and an administrator on their forums, The Vinculum, which was one of my first forum homes. My very first forum was actually not a fan site, it was the fanfiction.net Zelda boards which died when ff.net had a huge crash in 2001. I was also active on the North Castle forums, that's where I met @Malia (and one of her sisters too!). I'm still in touch with Juliet and her sister Kirsty. I definitely did the rounds and used to visit as many fan sites as I could, so seeing all these old names like ZHQ, Ganon's Tower, The Odyssey of Hyrule, etc. brings back a lot of memories! I'll add a few more: E-Zelda, MCLOZ, The Grand Adventures, LOZ.com, History of Hyrule, Hyrule.com.ar, The Desert Colossus.

As I went from being a student to working full time, there was no way I had time to run a website on my own, so I ended up merging with Zelda Universe in 2011. I'd met Cody in 2009, and he spent about a year trying to talk me into it! I worked behind the scenes for several months developing the Temple 2 theme and porting content over before we announced it publicly (zeldauniverse.net/2011/06/06/t…new-layout-for-a-new-era/). We had also planned to merge the two forum communities, but merging two huge databases was a massive task and we simply didn't have a server powerful enough to handle it. After several failed attempts by several people I eventually drew a line in the sand and we decided to just move forward. Apart from the server issues, I'm so happy that I merged with ZU, since then I've been able to do so much more than I could have on my own (or with the small staff I had), and I still love running a fan site after nearly 17 years!

The funny thing is that in the early 2000s - in the Lars era - I would have never imagined myself working at ZU. They had a reputation in the community for being arrogant. One of my earliest memories was in about 2002 when Lars stole some artwork that Kasuto had created and claimed it was official art, so Kasuto posted about it and some ZU forum members came over to his forum to stir up trouble. It didn't end up being a huge drama, but Kasuto was so mad at the time! In 2011 I asked him to write a guest article for our "25 Years in 25 Days" Zelda 25th anniversary project, and had to convince him that ZU had changed a lot in that time! I know a few of the old-school webmasters who hadn't kept up with the community so much were really surprised that I merged with ZU at the time!

Speaking of old school webmasters... I married one! @TheMissingLink and I had been good friends since around 2006 (when he was running Zelda Blog), we met up in person in 2010 and got married in 2016 I honestly can't imagine where my life would be without the online Zelda Community.