MKWiiU.com Forums Memorial

[Vega]

MKWiiU.com Forums Memorial



MKWiiU memorial created on February 5th, 2018. Picture shown above was the forums homepage logo. RIP...

From Sep 10, 2013 to Oct 22, 2014, Aruba and I ran the MKWiiU.com forums. Around a week before the start of the forums, Aruba and I pondered the idea of changing my IP-hosted simple html site to a forum-based site that actually had a domain name. Some days later, we noticed the domain mkwiiu.com was available and for a cheap yearly rate of $13. The intent of the forums was to be mainly focused on the upcoming release of Mario Kart 8 for the Wii U. Many combinations using the number 8 (for mk8) for domain names were already taken so we thought mkwiiu was the next best name. It would later turn out that the forums became mostly MKWii-based. On Sep 9, 2013, Aruba bought the domain. The next day, I did all the server/forum work and later that night once DNS records were updated throughout the Internet's root servers, the MKWiiU.com forums were up and running.

It wouldn't take long for the forums to receive some increasing traffic. With constantly updated & accurate Top Tens along with other valuable info/threads, MKWiiU.com forums became the go-to forums for quite a bit of people. Top Tier TTers such as Murabito, Demon, Cole, etc regularly visited the forums. Silver (former MH WR holder) was a mod, I was a global mod, and Aruba was the admin. A little bit after the start of the forums, I created a Banned/Pending Players list. This list/thread was to help keep a database of former cheaters since there was no such thing kept by the mkw community at the time. I also created a Rules & Regulations thread to set concrete rules on the Top Ten charts. These rules would later influence other MKW websites' rules (such as the MKWPP).

On Oct 22, 2014, the home server hard drive took a dump. Unfortunately, I was being complacent at the time and was not doing my regular backups. Due to having an outdated forum database backup, I decided to allow the forums to stay down. At the time, I left the mkw community and focused on the Call of Duty Black Ops 2 Wii U game. On Sep 9, 2015, Aruba and I saw no reason to renew the domain, so it expired and some unknown time later, somebody else bought it from the free market.

On Dec 31, 2017, I took a glance at some domain sellers to see if mkwiiu.com was available for purchase. The current owner of the domain at the time, placed it on the market for around an $800 yearly rate. No way I was going to pay that much for it. While making a rough draft of this page, I decided to take another look to see if the price went down at all. To my surprise, the domain was no longer under ownership (the current owner let it expired, domain went to the unregulated free market). Not only that, it was on sale from my favorite domain seller for $6.99 per year! I notified Aruba, and purchased the domain. After purchase, I configured the mkwiiu.com domain to go to mkwii.org.

On February 10, 2018, I configured NginX for MKWiiU.com to have it's own site seperate from MKWii.org. MKWiiU.com domain is officially revived and it simply contains the Forums logo and a link to the Memorial on MKWii.org. The next day, on the 11th, I moved the memorial to MKWiiU.com. On Feb 17, 2018 a link to the site's memorial was placed in a thread at the MKWii.org forums (which later becomes the MKWii.com forums).

Fast forward to February 5, 2020, I decided to let the MKWiiU.com expire. It was nice to have back, but having MKWii.com for the main forums was achieved and I already had too many domains. A few days later on the 9th, the forum thread that simply had a link to the MKWiiU.com site's memorial was updated to include all the content of the memorial since the domain was let go.

Below is a link to a zip archive of 22 PDF screenshot files of the old MKWiiU.com forums utilizing the Internet Wayback Machine. I want to the thank all the staff from the Internet Wayback Machine for their awesome site, and I want to thank whoever was smart enough to take screenshots to send to the Wayback machine when the forums were up and running

ZIP file download link HERE
SHA256 checksum for the ZIP file HERE

The zip archive contains the following screenshots...

Aus/NZ Top Ten Thread 8/17/14
Banned/Pending Players Thread 8/10/14
BKS Thread; Page 13 7/14/14
Euro Top Ten Thread 8/16/14
Home Page 2/13/14
Home Page 7/20/14
Home Page 8/17/14
Home Page 8/26/14
Home Page 9/8/14
Home Page 9/15/14
Home Page 10/22/14
MKW Time Trials Sub Forum 7/20/14
MKW Time Trials Sub Forum 8/17/14
MKW Time Trials Sub Forum 9/8/14
WW Top Ten Thread 9/26/13
WW Top Ten Thread 12/28/13
WW Top Ten Thread 6/8/14
WW Top Ten Thread 7/2/14
WW Top Ten Thread; Page 2 7/30/14
WW Top Ten Thread; Page 3 7/30/14
WW Top Ten Thread; Page 4 7/30/14
WW Top Ten Thread; Printed Page Version 7/30/14