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Re:Magic the Gathering Players Lament the Loss of 30-Year Hi... by snickmy on Saturday January 28, 2023 @03:20AM (#34556105)
Back in 1998, when I was a 12y old, I started a website about Magic. I was an italian kid that didn't know any english, with a pentium 2 and a cracked version of front page.

fast forward 3 years from there, I was running the the biggest italian magic community with ~15k concurrent active users daily, with one of the biggest deployed use cased of a asp/access database (because hosts were charing a lot more for php+sql).

Foreigners were running their own subforums on it, with the brazilian and french community being the biggest one.

I did suck at the game, but every time I was attending an event, every single person knew the website and had only nice things to say about it.

It was magical, I didn't know what I was doing, and I didn't realised what I achieve until very very long after. Me wanting to connect with people online on such a niche topic, and having to create a platform for it, started a personal learning chain reaction, that down the line allowed me to enter the tech world with ease.

Re:Magic the Gathering Players Lament the Loss of 30-Year Hi... by WirelessGigabit on Saturday January 28, 2023 @03:45AM (#34556195)
I'm actually surprised that ASP & Access were cheaper than PHP & (assuming) mySQL.

In Belgium it was the other way around. PHP and MySQL was cheap, anything Microsoft related was more expensive.

Re:Magic the Gathering Players Lament the Loss of 30-Year Hi... by adql on Saturday January 28, 2023 @04:01AM (#34556258)
...probably running on pirated windows lmao
Re:Magic the Gathering Players Lament the Loss of 30-Year Hi... by firstcommentyo on Saturday January 28, 2023 @08:26AM (#34557399)
Must have been a hell of a fight? Pirates from the British or the Spanish crown?
Re:Magic the Gathering Players Lament the Loss of 30-Year Hi... by smagut on Saturday January 28, 2023 @04:44AM (#34556417)
What was the website name? I started playing Magic in Italy around 2002/3, maybe I've stumbled upon your site
Re:Magic the Gathering Players Lament the Loss of 30-Year Hi... by sfmike on Saturday January 28, 2023 @10:53AM (#34558559)
mtgox?
Re:Magic the Gathering Players Lament the Loss of 30-Year Hi... by snickmy on Sunday January 29, 2023 @10:36AM (#34569015)
thebibleofmagic
Re:Magic the Gathering Players Lament the Loss of 30-Year Hi... by harrydehal on Monday January 30, 2023 @02:24AM (#34576813)
Loved this story. Is this a peek of your site on the Wayback Machine? The late 90s and early 2000s were such a magical time for the early web!

https://web.archive.org/web/20020930072241/http://www.thebib...