TIDMADT is one of the most challenging websites I have ever worked on.  There are so many different parts to it, and I work on adding modules and functionality to it almost every day.  It is a labour of love, and I am absolutely thrilled when our members give me complements on the site.  The Admins are all here because they love what they do, they are gamers at heart, and we believe in supporting our members 100%.  Without our members, this site would be nothing, and all the hard work would be a waste.

I wanted to take a moment to talk ABOUT the site, about all the different elements that we have brought together to make it what it is.  First, I want to give credit to the people whose work I stole because they DID work hard, and deserve the kudos.  Second, there is quite possibly some legal requirement to do so…

Let me start by saying that almost every module that gets added to this site gets hacked all to hell to make it fit in and work with all the other parts of the site.  At times this is done with pre-written mods, and at times this requires brute force modding.  So far, it has worked out pretty well…

The site is run off PHP, using a MySQL database that (currently) has over 130 tables and grows almost daily.  I chose jQuery as my JavaScript library years ago, and have seen absolutely no reason to change.

At the heart of our site are the Forums and Blogs, for which we used phpBB3 and WordPress.  There is also (though we haven’t used it much as of yet) a Wiki, powered by MediaWiki.  The security for all of these has been hacked together so that users only have to log in once to access all of these, and the security also helps control our custom Site Admin area (to manage features of the site not covered by the admin areas of the core modules).

For the main site, we started with the War Zone template from ClanTemplates.  The site is great, by the way, and anyone who is thinking about starting up a Clan website can do far worse than browsing their site for a starting point.  The first thing I did, however, was take their code and totally rewrite it.  The basic site I started with looked fantastic, but I made the HTML/CSS more modular, and reworked it to fit my programming style.

Lorna, our WebMistress at large and resident expert on all things involving graphics, added the beautiful background you see to represent the myriad of interests represented on this site, everything from gaming to anime to fantasy art.  The one piece of original artwork in the background is the girl walking up the stairs, which is a charcoal portrait I did years ago.  She has been dying to work my artwork in somewhere to show that I am more than just a programmer, and here she found her chance!  Filters were added to the original graphics from the War Zone template, image sizes were changed, and most traces of the original War Zone template have been removed, with the exception of the column format.

For the “internal” pages, I started with the DarkFantasy theme for phpBB from Gamexe.net. The style was created by Daniel St. Jules, and I loved it. The format, however, was only about 820 pixels wide, and I wanted to increase the width, so I hacked it a bit, playing with the graphics and the CSS to make it more what I wanted. The result became the theme used for all secondary pages.

I ported the DarkTidmadt theme over to WordPress.  Normally, when I reskin a WordPress site for a client, I simply grab the default template, copy the files over, then hack and hobble them until they look the way I want.  This was the first time I ever started a new Theme from scratch, writing each and every module required.  It was a fun learning experience, one I had been dying to try, and like so many other things, TIDMADT gave me the excuse to do it.

All together, I call the theme “DarkTidmadt”. I started using the term when I began hacking the DarkFantasy theme, and simply copied all the files into another directory where I went to editing. I needed to call the new directory something, so DarkFantasy became DarkTidmadt, and it has stuck to become the semi-official theme name for the whole site.

Welcome to TIDMADT, An Online Gaming Community!

Way back in the early 80′s, I was a member of a BBS named TIDMADT.  Back then, I was on an 8088 series 1 computer upgraded to 640k of RAM using a 300 Baud Hayes Smartmodem.  It is hard for the younger generation to imagine what being online was like back then, a time when text came in one character at a time.  Graphics were non-existant, and at that time even the neat ASCII artwork was years from making an appearance. Compared to the megabit on demand world we live in today, it was brutal…

Fast forward to the 90′s. I was excited that the legendary Ultima series was making a massive online game where we would all be able to play together. It was Richard Garriott, the creator of the Ultima series, who first coined the phrase MMORPG.  Can you imagine a time when there wasn’t such a thing?  A brave group of enthusiasts decided to reverse engineer the Ultima Online server, and the world of Free Shards was born.  With a Free Shard server, you could create your own world… change the map, create your own storyline… alter almost every aspect of how the game worked.  How could a programmer (and an admitted Ultima addict) resist?  I began looking for a domain name for the Free Shard I was running, and was pleased and surprised to find out that tidmadt.com was available.  It was mine just as fast as my fingers could type it in!

While there is still a large following for Ultima Online, and for the Free Shards that followed, the internet is now home to hundreds of Massively Multiplayer Online games… there are games in practically every genre in a variety to fit an infinitely diverse playstyle.  Whatever is your pleasure, there is likely an MMO out there that fits it.

My latest little addiction has been World of Tanks. In a random match, someone shouted out before battle a general invitation to join their Clan. I had been grinding up, and was itching to join the larger Ultimate Conquest campaigns, so I went to check out their site… I liked it, and I liked the people who were running the WoT division of the Clan, so I signed up.

Clan politics can be a dicey thing at times.  It’s like an extended family, one that has feuds and, occasionally, divorces.  Politics brought that Clan down, and the entire WoT division (along with a fair amount of the rest of the Clan) came with us.  Problem was, we needed a place to go… as I had not been doing much with TIDMADT lately, I offered to make a temporary home for us here.  “Temporary” has become “Permanent”, much to my pleasure, and our community has grown… and we hope it will continue to grow.

The division leaders who left the old Clan became the Admins of TIDMADT, and I am honoured to be in their company.  We all have similar ideals, similar goals, and a vision for what we hope TIDMADT to become.  One of those is that we are a MULTI-GAME, MULTI-CLAN community.  While we love playing World of Tanks, there are <gasp> other games that we like to play, too.  We wanted to make sure that all of those games were supported on the site.  As our membership grows, we will do our best to support ANY game that they want to play… to be truly multi-game, in any way that we can to support our members.

We also decided to be “multi-clan”.  Joining TIDMADT is NOT joining a Clan, it is joining a community made up of Clans and their members.  While we currently only have one World of Tanks Clan in our ranks, if another Clan came along and wanted to join the TIDMADT community, we would do our best to support them, sharing our resources with them, and giving them their own private section on the forums where they could discuss strategy and tactics separate from our current WoT Clan, the TIDMADT Death Crew.  We believe in diversity, and we believe that in that diversity we can only become stronger.

So that is the story of how TIDMADT came to be.  Our community is made up of members from around the world.  Our history is rich, but it is the bright future that we look forward to.