10 things you probably didn't know about this site

• Posted by Paul April 2, 2016 - 987 views

  Five years is a long time on the Internet, and there have been lots of twists and turns along the way with The Skyrin Blog / Tamriel Vault.

  So, just for fun, I thought I'd delve back into history and take a look at some of the things that many of you newer people might not realise about the history and background of the site. The site wasn't always a super-active social network with 14,000 members. At one time it was a humble Wordpress Blog (hence the name) with just me!

  Here we go then with 10 things you probably didn't know about this site...

  1. The site was never meant to last beyond the release of Skyrim

  Yes, it’s true. When I started The Skyrim Blog it was meant to be a hobby to pass the time until Skyrim was released, and a place to collect together news and rumours about the game. The original idea was to dump the site into Oblivion on November 10^th…

  2. When the game was previewed at E3 the hosting company took the site offline due to the surge in traffic 

  This was the point where I realised I was onto something with The Skyrim Blog. There was such a spike in visitors when the first footage of Skyrim was released that the hosting company decided to take the site down temporarily as they feared that the site was being used for a DDOS attack! I had to ring them up and explain that this was traffic caused by the hype for a video game! Fortunately, things settled down and the site was back on line within a few hours

  3. It took more than two months for a single comment to be made on the site        

  Hard to believe, now that we have people active on the site constantly – but when The Skyrim Blog first started in April 2011 it took just over two months for anyone to respond with a comment to any of the posts. With no Google Analytics at that point, I had no way to know if anyone was even reading the site. More than once I considered giving up and deleting the site.

  4. We caught a lucky break from Bethesda’s forums

  As some of you might know, Bethesda forums have a strict policy against people publicising their own sites. So I was unable to tell people about The Skyrim Blog for fear of being booted off. Fortunately, someone started a topic: ‘Do you know of any Skyrim fan sites’. I was able to make several posts on the thread about The Skyrim Blog and quite a few people came to the site at that point. 

  5. Over 300 people signed up to the site on the first day the site moved to Ning

  When the site switched from Wordpress to Ning on October 19^th 2011, I had hopes that a few people would create memberships. But I wasn’t quite ready for the 300+ people who flocked to the new site. Being in the UK, I went to bed at a time when a lot of Stateside people were just coming onto the site – so I had 150 accounts to validate when I got up the next morning 

  6. For the first few months after Skyrim we had no hosts or admins…

  … apart from me! Crazy as it sounds now, I did everything myself. I started adding Hosts once we started with Groups. Lore was the first group, followed by ‘Girl Gamers’ (whatever happened to that one?)

  7. There have been 85 people who have been a host on the site

  Many of those people have long since moved on from the site. Who can even remember Madison Jade or Kevin or Ssarrasum Blackscale? But we are grateful for all the heavy lifting that’s been done by Hosts and Admins over the last five years.

  8. The second ever account created on the site was a fake

  Because I needed a way to be able to view the site from the perspective of a non-Admin, I made sure that I had a second account to be able to do so. Hence the second ever member of The Skyrim Blog was also me – an account named after my favourite Oblivion merchant, Thoronir. It was kinda funny when people send a friend request or even PM to ‘Thoronir’…

  9. We have swung the ban hammer 371 times on the site

  We’ve always had a zero tolerance policy for spammer, trolls and idiots – so it probably comes as no surprise that we’ve booted so many people. One notorious spammer has made at least a dozen accounts with slightly different email addresses and been kicked out every time. 

  10. Four million reasons to be proud of our achievement

  There’s actually no way to know just how many visitors we have had on the site over the last five years. The current Google Analytics has been onsite for just under a year, and since May 2015 we have had 702,598 people visiting the site. Wow! Projecting back over five years, taking into account that more people visited when Skyrim first came out, it’s likely that the total has been over 4 million