A
The Wheel of Time -related
website, located at wotmania.com, created, maintained and hosted by Michael Mackert, except for its domain name which is through
geocities.
Wotmania has a cool encyclopedia which I have consulted many times for my WoT-noding spree, a large theory post, a chat that has had many past problems (I am going to code a replacement once I can bother), but most importantly, a message board.
Wotmania's message board is said to be one of the more friendly boards on newbies. It can be hard to believe when newbie with poor spelling suggesting that Mazrim Taim might actually be Demandred gets flamed so hard his remains couldn't fill a spoon, or when the so-called newbie wars erupted, but it might actually be true.
As for the newbie wars, it was a series of events leading into webmaster, known as wotmania also, removed many threads and sent a warning message to board. It all began when a newbie, new fella from japan posted a thread just for introducing himself. It got a *lot* of responses, and inspired by this, many others recently entered encouraged to introduce themselves, myself included (although I had been a member for more than two months). Shortly the board was filled with these pointless introduces. First the introduce-threads started to get hot, and after the board filled with threads saying how much the introduces suck. It was almost like E2 civil war and getting to know you nodes (does this suggest some kind of general, unevitable phenomen in BBS-like communities?).
It cooled down as third wave, consisting of people saying they shouldn't be so flame, came in, and finally the webmaster cleaned the board a bit and told people to be nice. A bit later, new feature was added, providing people a possibility of creating a profile for themselves, apparently meant to eliminate these threads. They still do pop up, but somehow people don't get as high reaction on them any more. Now, the wars are remembered with fondness, mostly by myself (others seem to ignore it).