It was a chilly winter night late 2003/early 2004, when I received a phone call from Michael. The two of us were always working on new web pages, whether they were something we made from Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, or Freewebs. But this time he had found the best—a place called Avidgamers.
Avidgamers.com was a free community hosting website created by Jon Valvatne, which was home to many clans and role-playing guilds for a variety of games; one of which was RuneScape. That very night, I used that website to register a page that would soon become the home of the Shining Knights Force clan. You can read more about Avidgamers, here.
What was Shining Knights Force? The name came from a game I played called Shining Force: The Legacy of Great Intentions, which was a 1992 turn-based strategy RPG made by Sega and Camelot games for the Mega Drive/SEGA Genesis.
I was going to name my clan after that game. Without thoroughly thinking about my choices, I eagerly rushed through the registration of the website. I named it Shining Knights Force, the URL being www.avidgamers.com/shiningpkers. PKing, which stands for Player-Killing, was one of the most popular games in RuneScape. The northern area of RuneScape was sectioned off and named the Wilderness. Once one entered this deadly zone, there was no protection from other players. The deeper one traveled, the more dangerous it would become, as it would be easier for higher level players to attack.
Eventually RuneScape would remove the feature and replace it with a minigame called Bounty Hunter. But at this time, clans would group together to go on PKing trips. But such was not the case with ours. I would later regret giving our website address the surname “shiningpkers,” because the name misrepresented what our clan was about, and sometimes it even turned people away who were not interested in joining PKing clans.
No, we were not PKers. We rarely had PKing trips, and when we did, they were not very successful. For the most part, our clan stayed away from the Wilderness. But besides PKing, we would on rare occasion aid each other in Wilderness-involved quests, and sometimes protect each other while we mined Runite ores in high-level Wilderness.
So “shiningpkers” was not a good choice for the website’s URL. But that was okay, because the name was not important. We were the Shining Knights Force clan, and that was all that mattered.
I quickly called Michael back and told him that had I registered a page on the website that he had told me about. We were both thrilled, and got right to work on putting it together.
I was not a programmer. But Michael knew simple codes. Over the phone, he had explained what HTML tags were to me. I knew them as the “less-than” (<) and “greater-than” (>) symbols that were essential to programming. Jeffrey was also interested in scripting, so we shared some books on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript over the next couple of years. Michael taught me the basics, and that was enough to change the colors and customize the essentials.
The website was an empty shell, void of content. It came with olive green tables and a navy blue background. The scheme needed to be drastically altered! We always would debate over the colors, and over the course of the page’s history, we would go from a blue-on-blue scheme, to a white-on-black scheme (complete with falling snowflakes and a dancing Santa Claus during Christmas), and finally to a red-on-black-on-red scheme that would be the final template for the website.
Once the colors were complete, the next step was music. Michael and I both loved piano and music. I left it to him to pick music for the website. He was a fan of the Final Fantasy games, and selected various tracks from the Final Fantasy X OST for our pages. They altered with the tone of the page. For example, embedded in the home page was a very dramatic and exhilarating theme song (FFX: Normal Battle), the page which listed the banned members had a ‘scary’ themed song (FFX: Otherworld), and the forums had a jazzy, upbeat song (FFX: Brass de Chocobo). We thought the songs were very cool. Later on as more people poured into the clan, they requested that we have the option to manually turn off the songs, as they became quite annoying to some. However, Michael still held onto the soundtrack, and now I’ve embedded it into this new website!
The website was set up with a Public Area and a Private Area. The Public Area was the front page of the website where one could apply for membership and login to the Private Area. There was a scrolling marquee welcome text that greeted the user with a prologue to the clan. Also, at one time there were links to skill and quest guides in the public area. On one instance, Jeffrey and I spent a whole day at his house, working on a guide for Runecrafting, which was a brand new skill for “RuneScape 2”. Later those guides were decidedly inappropriate for the website (it was a clan community, not a tip/help site) and were removed.
The Private Area was much more personal. Inside, one was greeted with the recent news, called “the welcome text” where the leaders would post major announcements. On the left side pane were the interactive links, followed by the page content. The interactive menu included a link to the Private Board (which served as our forum, with thousands upon thousands of messages), a link to Voting Topics (where we would decide what kind of clan events we liked best, what color team capes to wear PKing, etc.), a link to the Messaging System (where the members could send private messages to each other), a link to the Member List (which displayed all of the members with links to their respective profiles, ordered by either rank or by name), and a link to Account Setup (where one could change their password, avatar, signature, and update their profile.)
The “Other Content” menu featured many pages, silly and serious, including the Calendar page (an actual, monthly calendar image that I would plan out and update to list scheduled clan events), the Clan Events page (which described each type of clan event, how they were performed, which server we met on, and where in the world we met for the event), the Shining Jokes page (which featured silly gags that we probably copied from RuneHQ or Tip.it like "You know you've been playing RuneScape too long when..."), the Tavern page (which presented stories like Michael’s Plague City storyline, R.J.’s Togar story, and other tales written by fellow clan members, that were submitted in the forum, and formatted into pages by Ethan), the Downloads page (which hosted links to files like Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, RuneScape Explorer by E-Razor, etc.), the Shining Allies page (which included a list of our clan’s allies), the Shining Rules page (which was the “law book” copied partly from RuneHQ’s forum rules), the Banned members page (which listed those who were banned from the clan and were not allowed back in), the Shining Chatroom page (which was a Java chatroom that everybody begged for but rarely showed up in, and sometimes there were people impersonating the leaders… it was a mess!), the Shining Newspaper (a page I once made to talk about RuneScape updates and what was going on in RuneScape, which was modeled off of RuneHQ’s newspaper but didn’t last very long), and at one point there was even a “Reaction Flash Game” page (where people could test their reaction click time when they got bored, and post their scores in the forum)! Beneath this section was a “Who’s Online” table, followed by the clan crest, which was originally made by Lazerlizard1.
There was a third menu panel visible, if one was logged in with moderator or administrator privileges. This section had links to our control panel, where you could access the Simple Layout settings (where one could change color templates, edit the welcome texts, etc.), the Voting settings (where one could add, delete, and edit different voting topics), the Pages settings (where one could add, delete, and edit different pages for the Other Content section), the User settings (where one could edit, rank, and demote members), the Levels settings (where one could change the different ranks and user levels), the Access Log (where one could check the number of times a user has ever logged in, listed in order of date of last login), the Forum Topics settings (where one could manage the forums, its subsections, and restrictions), and the Advanced Layout settings (where one could edit the raw codes of the website in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript).
Our website was set up, complete with content and a working system. I was the Shining King; Michael and Jeffrey were the Shining Princes, and Nick was the Shining Knight. Our next step was to recruit.