Webmaster Greg here. It’s my birthday tomorrow and, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share a bit of history about this website and what comes next.
I started this website back in 2007 when I was a senior in college. I was working on my engineering degree at the time and somehow thought that taking on a new project sounded like a great idea. I was 20 years old at the time… I had been working with the Mission Kim Possible group since I was about 14 or so, and I had become one of the two webmasters of Save Disney Shows at 17. We had, against all odds, been successful in getting Kim Possible a 4th season, but the momentum for our other campaigns had stalled.
Two of the people who had helped me at SDS, and whom I really admired, decided to create a new Kim Possible fansite called KP Fan World. Adam had previously been working on making screencaps of the show and hosting them on SDS, so when he left, it only made sense that he set up the new screencap galleries on KPFW.
I was a huge fan of the screenshot galleries. They were very helpful back in those days as we were making user graphics for various forums and promotional graphics for campaigns, so I wanted something similar for all of our other shows: Phil of the Future, Wizards of Waverly Place, Sonny with a Chance—the list goes on. Adam had previously let me know what program he used to make the screencaps and I had access to his gallery software, so I took it upon myself to screencap every other Disney Channel show besides KP. What can I say? I was young.
That was the original purpose and mission of this website, DC Fans: to serve as a general Disney Channel fansite with news and updates on this WordPress blog, with the main content being the various image galleries. The site would also give me a built-in audience to promote our various SDS campaigns as needed, especially since we often didn’t know which shows needed help until they were suddenly cancelled out of the blue, like Phil of the Future was at the end of season two.
Everything went fine for a while—until the host we were using, who had previously offered “unlimited” file storage, suddenly imposed a limit on the total number of files. The image gallery, as you might imagine, contained approximately 2,500 files per episode, and we had roughly 100 episodes of various shows at the time, putting us well over a quarter million files. The limit was something like 10k. It was laughable. You can look through some of the old updates if you want more information, but the long and short of it was that no matter what I tried, I was not able to keep those image galleries up long-term.
The website’s mission never really changed; we were born a DC fansite and that’s what we always were, but when we lost the screencaps, the content evolved as well. I had already created the “celeb” gallery at least as far back as 2008 when I posted about Demi’s concert at the Roxy. I had posted some other noteworthy or otherwise interesting celeb galleries as well, but it was never intended to be a major feature of the site. However, the thing I realized pretty quickly was that the celeb folders ran about 20–40 files on average instead of 2,500 for a single episode’s screencaps. If the website was to survive, that looked like the best path forward.
Looking back on it now, some 15-ish years later, I can definitely say that while the intention was pure, the execution was not the best. Still, the website survived and even thrived under the shift in direction. The eyeballs that the site pulled in were converted to ad revenue that allowed me to keep SDS running. Quite simply put, without DCF subsidizing the web costs, there was no way a 20-something-year-old Greg would have been able to keep SDS running.
2013 saw two events that brought about the end of the website. The first happened in the early part of the year. By that time, the site had split the blog and image galleries across two different servers for cost and performance reasons. Using a clever bit of code, I was able to reskin the gallery website to match the look of DCF, SDS, NGB, SCD, or any of my other websites at the time. DC Fans was the default skin, and it contained the advertising code for our largest ad partner. This partner did not allow their ads to be placed next to any content containing nudity. DCF did not allow nudity… but one of the affiliated sites did. A programming error caused the link to render under the DCF design, including the advertising code. I worked with the ad agency to explain the cause and design a safeguard to ensure it wouldn’t happen again, but we still lost that specific advertiser. Without them bidding up our ad placements, total ad revenue fell 90% from that source. I increased other ads as a result and was able to stem the tide somewhat, but we still lost about 50% of total revenue overnight due to one stupid mistake.
With revenues down and expenses continuing to rise, it was not looking great for the future of DCF, SDS, and the affiliated sites. I launched new projects and increased posting frequency to try to turn the tide, but ultimately, I don’t know if it would have been enough. Later that year, I was sued for copyright infringement. The websites had recovered slightly, but were still in the red. All of a sudden, I had an agency demanding I remove certain images from the site and pay an ungodly amount in compensation for their use in the first place. There was also no way to verify if this agency even had a legal claim to the images in question, or if they would claim other images in the future. I still believe that the complaint was frivolous and that any third-party images used on the site were covered under fair use, but the matter was ultimately resolved in the courts. To avoid any further claims with this group, I had no choice but to pull everything offline. It was a money-losing proposition at that point anyway. I was done.
I had begun to cover various events in LA firsthand. I had gotten press access to Comic-Con and several other events. I had some original content, I could get more, I could pivot—no. I passed management and responsibilities of SDS over to my associate, Wayne, and wiped my hands of the whole thing. It was time to let it go.
I ended up moving and finding a new job. For the first time in my life, I was making decent money, but it kept me busy. I didn’t have time for hobbies; I was grinding for that paycheck. I settled into a new normal, and yeah, sometimes I missed the old websites. More than anything, I had journaled a large portion of my life online in a format that was now inaccessible.
And that brings us back to today. Or rather, about a month ago when I decompressed an old database dump onto a new webhost and started sorting through old posts. It’s been a real trip sorting through the past and remembering so many things I had long forgotten—like how they had announced production on a Lemonade Mouth 2 before quietly canceling it a few months later. And I’m not done yet, obviously. The old image galleries are never coming back, of course. But my movie reviews and commentary, plus the photos and videos that I took for more than half a decade at various events all over SoCal? Those are all fair game.
So think of this less as a comeback and more as an archive: a place where the past, for good and bad, can continue to exist. And I’m leaving the door open for potential new content… although that seems pretty unlikely at this point, you never really know what the future will bring.
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Welcome back!