The Story

Although many people could care less about history, this page provides the story behind VirtualTeen.org - from the beginning to the present day. Most of this information contains important details that form a summarized idea of the history - for any questions, feel free to email one of the current administrators.

The Beginning

Caption: Old VirtualTeen.org forums logo

A man named Sam Alexander had started a network called GovTeen, Inc. in the late 90s. This network allowed communities of teenagers to form on the internet. As it expanded, Sam funded numerous projects (separate sites) suggested by teens if the purpose was unique but still based around teens. Sam paid for all the expenses (software licensing, domain hosting, and other site expenses) that each project had accumulated. Although Sam became less active in the GovTeen community, he continued to pay for everything, as he believed that these sites helped teens with their problems, issues, and interests.

VirtualTeen.org was created in March of 2004 as a project of GovTeen, Inc. to help and support mentally ill teens. Josh (TheWizard) was the founder of the project. Josh, having schizophrenia, felt that teens with disorders and/or mental illnesses should have a place to feel comfortable and find answers to questions.

Josh had started the site with aid from Francis (Triple7), who made a fantastic webmaster. By the end of March in 2004, VirtualTeen.org already had a community, and it was rapidly growing. Francis also whipped up a 4-table site design that contained the logo he designed, the required t, the content-topics selection, and the content. For the next few months, the two administrators, Josh and Francis, formed new forums, added site features, and actively participated in discussions.

Revolution and Evolution

Between the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005, certain members of the community believed that use of the site was a right, instead of a privilege. This group of members had extreme contempt toward most of the staff of the site. Until this period, an official set of rules was not needed, but it became clear to the management that without rules and regulations, the site would fall into a chaotic state.

A set of rules was drafted, revised, and then published in the final days of December 2004. While most members silently welcomed the rules, other teens protested. Shortly before the rules were published, a staff member known as Kiros was promoted to a new position that he suggested, the Counselor position. As Kiros supported the administrators, the troublesome group of members had great contempt toward him.

After several protests of the rules, a few members had to be banned for serious violations of the rules. This caused tensions in the community, so the members were allowed to return if they followed the rules. None of the members returned immediately, although some of them eventually returned to become reacquainted with the site.

The community continued to grow and VirtualTeen became a general teen community with plenty of topics. However, the intended mission of the site was still recognized and VirtualTeen continued to support teens with mental illnesses.

In February of 2006, Kiros became the third administrator of the site. This allowed Josh and Francis to be a tad less stressed with administrative duties. The site and community continued to grow through the year.

Around the middle of 2006, Alex (redcar) was promoted to be the fourth administrator. It was around this time that Kiros had redesigned the home pages to fit the default forums style, with no changes from the 4-table layout that Francis had quickly created at the beginning. The site was also recoded to use a single dynamic PHP page instead of more than 40 SHTML pages.

As 2007 started, Josh became less active, and by April of 2007, he decided to leave his position as administrator and let the community grow without him.

Shortly after Josh had left, Francis also felt it was his time to step down. Unlike Josh, Francis continued to participate in the forums as a normal member. This left Kiros to be the webmaster of the site.

In September of 2007, Kiros had revealed that his real name was Ben, and the only reason he used the alias of Kiros was because he wasn't yet 18 years old. Before he was even registered at VirtualTeen, he had made a promise to his mother that he wouldn't use his real name until he was 18 years old.

It was around this time that Ben had incorporated Google Apps into the site, which gave the management the ability to use @virtualteen.org email addresses. Google Apps gave VirtualTeen staff members collaboration and documenting features as well. The staff now uses these features to design official documents, draft ideas, and communicate opinions in an organized fashion.

Although the site was running well and the community was very active, February of 2008 was a tough time. Ben had run himself into a situation that meant he couldn't be active on the site for an amount of time that was unknown. Ben and Alex asked Francis to return to help with administrative tasks, in which he gladly agreed to. Fortunately, just before April of 2008, Ben was able to return as an active administrator.

During a major upgrade of the forum software (vBulletin), the database containing all of the forum data started to crash. Thread data immediately showed signs of corruption, and then post data collapsed. The forums were closed for the next few days while Ben and Foong (the DotServant technical support) attempted to restore that massive database. Luckily, Ben had made a backup of the entire database about one day prior to the crash. Also, before reverting the database, Ben also made backups of the member, profile, and blog tables (which were not corrupted). The forums were reopened by the third day with only one day of posts missing. Some members have an image in their signatures that says "I survived the VirtualTeen crash of 2008," although everyone essentially "survived" it because nothing changed except for the one day of posts and threads.

Old Versions?

The older versions of the site have been archived and preserved in special directories. Please refer to the links below to browse the old versions of VirtualTeen.org.

VirtualTeen.org - Version 3

As of August 1, 2008, VirtualTeen.org has taken on a completely new site design and has countless new articles. The overall goal of the site has morphed into something new, and the community has new features and articles available. This is basically the third version of the entire site, and it will probably last throughout the lifetime of VirtualTeen.org.

On August 20, 2008, the site's name changed from VirtualTeen to Virtual Teen. This change will hopefully lead to better indexing in search engines. All in all, Virtual Teen is still VirtualTeen, VirtualTeen.org, VT, and VT.org.

With the new version of the site, there are new staff members that will have to take over the website. It is an unfortunate but definite pattern that administrations face, and the leadership roles of Francis, Ben, and Alex have now become history. With new administrators like Valerie and Anthony, VirtualTeen.org is awaiting a glorious future.

Special Thanks

Everything that exists today could not have been possible without Sam Alexander. Although Sam passed away in March of 2007, we (including his family) will never forget him. He was a great man with no equal, and he had a wonderful wife that supported him through it all. We thank Sam and Carol for everything (funding, support, and wisdom) that they provided throughout the years.

Thank you, Sam. Rest in peace.

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