How did the Gothiccommunity come about?

There was once...

This is how all fairy tales begin, but this is not a fairy tale but reality or virtual.

It was in 1996.
Back when the internet was still quite young, as was the IRC chat network, which is where it all started.
As a young chatter, which I still was back then, I was always on the IRC network Undernet where I was present in some channels and fought my way through all the many lines and also hit me many nights.

At some point I was more familiar with the IRC, its technology and procedure, and decided to set up my own channel with the other chatters. The #German_Gothic.
It was never well attended, but we were a tight-knit small community that met every evening to exchange ideas.
The request for a minimal homepage for this small channel grew more and more until I finally took pity and started to tinker a website for it.
This was initially good for introducing the current chat participants in more detail and explaining the rules of the channel in more detail.

At the beginning that was enough, but the desire grew more and more to expand this website and added new sections such as the explanation of what the IRC network is, how everything works there and the explanation of all commands and smilies that were current at the time.
This was soon followed by a new section called “Gothic” where it was explained what “Gothic” is, etc. at least what was understood by it as a young person at the time.
Of course, everyone has their own definition.
This basic structure of the website then remained in place for almost six months until I noticed that the site was well visited, but not the channel itself, which it was actually about.
Then I installed a Java applet which made it possible to connect to the channel via the website.

A short time later, a chatter member made me a suggestion that I should include a guest book.
Back then there weren't that many guest books to install yourself and most web hosts hadn't allowed this at all. So I had to choose a guest book provider and because I was there before I looked for a forum provider.
Both met with a very good response, but gradually the channel began to diverge.
There weren't that many chatters anymore and often the comment came that there was no longer any desire to do so. Some thought it was a shame, but others were of the opinion that something new should be here.
Little by little, fewer and fewer evenings came into the chat room until I said that the channel was now being closed.
That was the story of this #German_Gothic channel.
So now I was standing with this website and didn't want to throw it away.
One day a former co-worker made me aware of a portal system called PHP-Nuke.
At first I wasn't that enthusiastic about it. Perhaps it was due to my ignorance about this whole new subject or it was more the reluctance to build a complete portal system for such a small website.
We came to the decision to discard the website name #German_Gothic and came up with a new name.
It should have something to do with "Gothic" because we wanted to keep the old theme.
That was the first step. But only “Gothic” would have been too boring and wouldn't necessarily have attracted everyone because “Gothic” (miss) is understood a lot these days.
This portal system, which he had chosen at the time, could also be used as a pure community system. So what could be more obvious than somehow taking up the word community.
So we came to the decision to register the domain http://www.Gothiccommunity.de and started uploading the system to the server or, at that time, still web space.
Now it was the case that not every web space provider had installed the PHP programming language on the servers or, better said, had already partially installed it, but the server first had to be informed that these were PHP files.