Overview
Lurking Glass is essentially Helldot, but slightly re-imagined and renamed. We are still militantly opposed to censorship and still a bit of a strange place. The main drive behind changing the name was to remove any association with religion and to make it sound a bit less scary. The intention was to increase its appeal in the hopes of gaining new members.
Behind The "Lurking Glass"
The Helldot community was struggling to come up with a new name for the site. Many were considered, but nothing seemed right. Then a brilliant guy named PA_Dutch told us it should be called "Lurking Glass", and it was suddenly clear that there could be no other name.
I'm assuming you got the reference there, but if not and if you didn't read the Helldot section, Lurking Glass has always had a bit of an association with Alice in Wonderland. Lurking Glass sounds a lot like "Looking Glass", but with one of the words swapped for a common activity in web communities.
Concept Art
There were several stages in the design of the Lurking Glass look. The following is a look at a few of them, and in some cases, a little trivia.
Hellfire Proof-of-Concept — The original intention was to run Lurking Glass on custom forum software (code-named Hellfire) written by eviltechie using the Microsoft .NET platform. This is a screen shot of the first proof-of-concept. The software worked and was blazing fast, but other projects ended up consuming eviltechie's time and the Hellfire project was scrapped in favor of production software.
DE.VIO.US Demo — Yep, one of the names considered for Lurking Glass was DE.VIO.US. This demo was a bit more fleshed-out and was running on the Hellfire software.
Lurking Glass Concept 1 — Once the Lurking Glass name was decided. This was one of the first concepts.
Lurking Glass Concept 2 — Another concept. Interesting fact: the font in this and the previous concept is called "Beyond Wonderland".
Lurking Glass Final Concept Homepage — In the end it was decided that using a normal font for the logo was some previous level shit, so the Lurking Glass logo was scribbled down by hand.
Lurking Glass Final Concept Forum View — The original Lurking Glass concept was only a very dark layout. It was decided that it was too harsh and a lighter version was designed. Today only the light version survives.
New Server
In addition to a new look and an even more relaxed atmosphere than on Helldot, Lurking Glass was also launched on a new server. No more worries about web hosts kicking us out.
Elected Moderators
Due to the diversity and differences of opinion within the Lurking Glass community, it has always been a challenge to appoint the appropriate staff. Staff members tend to become targets of personal attacks, disrespect, and character assassination. Part of this is because of the permissive environment of Lurking Glass. Things are allowed here that would result in a ban anywhere else.
In an attempt to alleviate the problem we decided to let the community elect their own forum moderators. It was an interesting, but ultimately failed experiment. We gave it a shot, but eventually moved back to appointed moderators.
Member of the Week
Emulating a popular feature of Bolt, we started featuring a different site member on a regular basis. It wasn't strictly on a weekly basis, but was close. The project was discontinued after a few months due to other things competing for the time allotted to it.
MOTW Archive — View the archive of member of the week entries.
Supporters
Lurking Glass has had the benefit of a supportive community. Below is the list of members who have made monetary contributions.
Benefactors ($100+) — TheMixMonkey, foxie, OLYCOM, eviltechie, Starfish, Alucard.
Significant Supporters ($25+) — NOS, motive, angee, Blue_Oyster, DragonFly, GoldyLox05, bcans, woodle61, heypretty, Rab22, beguile, _manda_panda_, vociferous, sexyweed, casweLL, shadow_joker, spider, AL1CE.
Supporters — Jals, Bufferkiller, Bonnie, Brokin15, WindingPath, MrsMcShady, Amanda, trulytree, ravosava, emperorpartin.
2012 Update
In January of 2012, Lurking Glass underwent some major changes.
Site Structure — In the past we have always had a lot of forums, generally one forum for each subject commonly discussed on the site. After analyzing the situation, it was decided that it would make more sense to organize the site by interaction type. We ended up with just four major sections of the site: Discussion & Debate, Conversation, Visual Media Sharing & Self-Expression, and Writing. These changes were intended to make the site easier to navigate.
Software Upgrade — Lurking Glass was given a facelift and was migrated to superior forum software.
Relaxed Rules — This site has always been uncensored, generally quite politically incorrect, and has always made every attempt to treat everyone fairly. However, the new site structure has allowed us to relax the rules more than ever before. If anyone can find a web forum that has more relaxed, well-defined, and clear-cut (no gray area) rules we would LOVE to hear about it.
Expansion — A concerted effort is being made to grow the site, for one of the first times in its history. We're gonna be all up in the internet's business.
Revisions, Additions, & Corrections
If you know of any inaccurate information in the Lurking Glass history pages, if you have additional information on any of the sites or events, or if you believe we've missed an important topic. Please let eviltechie know.
