by Brandon Levan (Triumvirate)
Former phpBBHacks.com Support Team Member
It's a weird thing to see phpBBHacks.com at ten years old. I remember when it hit the five year mark back in 2006 and thinking how great it was to be involved with the site to some small degree. Now, here it is, five years beyond that anniversary, and I can say with complete honesty that I can't imagine my life without phpBBHacks.com.
I know, that probably sounds a little bit cheesy (or a lot cheesy, I suppose) but bear with me and I'll try to explain. The best way I can think to do so is to start at the beginning and work forward, and that beginning for me was in September of 2003, when I first joined the site.
Well, okay... I guess I'm already almost lying here. I didn't actually join the site. The original account creator was my brother and I together. We had just switched to using phpBB for our forums and signed up on the site to get some help. In the beginning, my brother made all the modifications to the site - the hacks we installed, he took the time to make the code changes. I think it's probably important to note at this point that neither one of us had any experience with programming of any kind. That said, there were usually simple instructions included with each hack, so it wasn't too difficult to follow them and get things done.
One night I decided I wanted to try my hand at installing a hack. As it turns out, this was not a good idea, because after I saved and uploaded the files, I was met with a mess of errors. Of course, I didn't have anything backed up (not a good habit to start, for the record). At this point I had no idea what to do, all I knew is that my site was throwing up errors and I didn't want my brother to know about it.
I went looking for help and posted on phpBBHacks.com. Several members posted and offered solutions including a member on the Support Team at the time and eventually I got it fixed. Now I was feeling confident, which was probably not the best thing. I started to try installing other hacks and, surprising no one, I seemed to get errors constantly. I took each one and posted about it and always got a reply back, sometimes with an exact fix and other times it would point me in the right direction and I could somehow get it done on my own. I started spending quite a bit of time after school on phpBBHacks.com. From the first posts that I made, I was always impressed by the fact that no one ever commented on how simple or "obvious" some of the mistakes I was making were. That was a nice change from so many other forums where I would be made to feel even worse about messing up my site than I already did.
As a few weeks passed, I started to see some topics where people were having errors that I had encountered before, so I would reply with what worked for me. I didn't think anything of it. Why would I? Everyone else had done the same for me. From there it turned into me logging into the site daily, most times asking for help, but whenever possible, trying to help others as well.
It wasn't until quite a few months later that I got a message from Patrick, asking if I'd like to join the Support Team. To say I was stunned would be an understatement. To be completely honest, I didn't even feel particularly qualified, I needed help just as often as I gave it. Still, I really enjoyed helping people figure out their issues and I was really loving diving into code and messing around with things, even if I did manage to mess my site up as many times as add anything useful. So, I accepted.
From there, I went on to post quite a bit and I hope help a few people out along the way.
As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, phpBBHacks.com changed my life and I did promise to get to what I meant by that, so here it is. Being on the Support Team has been one of the most rewarding things I've done. I was able to learn a great deal about programming in my time and even found that not only did I enjoy doing it, but I wasn't half bad either. Now, I even make a portion of my income off the programming skills I started learning here. Not only that, I can wholeheartedly say that the attitude that was a basic part of being a member at phpBBHacks.com has never failed me.
The internet is full of communities that treat newcomers with disdain or people with less knowledge then anathema. Luckily, there are great people, running great communities like phpBBHacks.com that will help anyone with kindness and respect. I don't think it's a shock to most people that the site is now at its 10th anniversary. It takes something special for a site to last ten years and without a doubt, phpBBHacks.com has it.
Brandon Levan, a former phpBBHacks.com Support Team Member who posts under the username Triumvirate, has the fifth most posts of anyone on the phpBBHacks.com Support Forums. Previously, he has released phpBB hacks and templates under the name Triumvirate Studios. Currently, he operates Green Gel Studios.
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