Update 2016 - This community is now called TeraGeek community.
Born in March 2014, the community of the Mesnie with over 100K unique visitors in the last 10 months has a rich history that I'd like to share with you. It's thanks to her that I came to learn Linux systems, create websites, TeamSpeak servers, Garry's Mod, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, that's why she's so important to me.
https://www.mesnie.org/ > https://terageek.org
I was part of a nice community on The Lord of the Rings Online, which I played for a few months, made up of around fifty active members. Unfortunately, however, the community was plagued by critical discord between the founder with full powers and the rest of the community. The TeamSpeak server that enabled us to communicate simply (in addition to the forum) was cut off, and as I was living in Paris at the time, with fiber optics, I hosted a replacement TeamSpeak server at my home. This allowed us to get together and decide to create our own community from the twenty or so players we were. But we decided that our community would be multi-gaming, meaning that it would support several games. It took some time to choose a name, but we settled on "Mesnie", a medieval term for people living under the same roof, with a brotherly, Lord of the Rings feel to it. We then set up a forum on forumactif to keep us on top of communications.
But here's where it gets interesting: I was about to leave Paris, and could no longer host TeamSpeak... So we needed a dedicated server. Two choices: either get a ready-made server, or do it ourselves, and be able to host our own forum (PHPBB) with our own domain name, and why not game servers. I obviously chose option 2! Except... nobody had the skills, and nobody wanted to do it. Guess who did?
After a few sleepless nights of tutorialsAfter many years of installing and reinstalling Debian servers, then ESXI, I finally managed to get a stable machine, with all the services imported, and I was beginning to learn not only about Debian, but also about how to set up a complete and functional LAMP (web/mail/ftp...) server. In April, I launched the first Garry's Mod server, which gave way to 7 other servers at the time of writing, all different, all customized. I then started to take an interest in WordPress, so as to be able to create news, dedicated pages and tutorials that could be seen by everyone in a more user-friendly way than a forum, and I finally managed to integrate PHPBB into WordPress while linking the users of both, which was no easy task. Thanks to this, I was able to create lrob.fr.
A year later, in April 2015, I took a much bigger server with better Anti-DDoS protection at OVH, which taught me how to migrate a server. By then, lrob.fr already existed, as did www.faatmusic.com and www.bisoumagique.fr.
Today, the community boasts 400 unique visitors a day, over 500 registered members, for a total of 100K unique visitors, and over a million page views.
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