After the fall of the old anime BBS community where
SG2,
AngelGoten, and
)v(ajin\/egita first met and became friends, the group was stuck in a limbo of trying to find a new hangout. However, nothing really stuck, so )v(ajin created his own forum on Invisionfree and attempted to get some of the old gang back together over there. The group languished in relative inactivity there for about a year, but were simply unable to attract many new members while the old ones became less and less active as time went by. The community had grown stale, and it was time for a change - but )v(ajin was nowhere to be found, and SG2 had only been given the role of moderator. Without administrative control over the forums, SG2 could not take true control of the dying community in )v('s stead.
Thus, in the spring of 2005, SG2 decided to repurpose the Invisionfree forum originally intended as a host and place of discussion for SG2's Dragonball fanfiction, Dragonball IGNO (hence, the community's name). SG2 attempted to round up what few members still lurked around )v(ajin's forum, then and took to inviting real-life friends from school to stir up some fresh activity. Anime and Japanese culture discussion eventually took a backseat to the ever-growing weirdness of the Off-Topic section, and it wasn't long before they were completely eclipsed - the 'randomness' became the main draw of the IGNO Forums.
The Invisionfree Era represents the IGNO community's birth and adolescence, still very unsure of what it was or wanted to be, and without a care as to what its future may one day hold. It's also a window into my own embarrassing weeaboo past...times that I, on the one hand, would love to bury and forget completely, but on the other feel inclined to preserve as memories of a simpler, more innocent (if cringeworthy) time.
In August of 2018, Invisionfree and Zetaboards services were discontinued as the platforum was purchased by
Tapatalk. I was never emailed about this and didn’t find out until the end of October when I went to the old Zetaboards looking for something and saw the error message. I managed to request a transfer of Zetaboards IGNO and YDB during the grace period, but I had forgotten to request a transfer of Invision IGNO until it was too late. So unfortunately, while I did have a text document full of links for Invision-era topics I still wanted to archive here, they’ve all been lost forever. Fortunately the topics that had already been archived are what I consider to be the highlights of the era.
It also broke a bunch of smilies used in the topic transcripts (since I was directly copying them from IF, which no longer exists). I’d like to go through and replace them with equivalents sometime just so the pages are less ugly, but that’s a project for another day.