Mercury Ice was started on January 16, 2004 as Water Ripple, a forum dedicated to uniting people from all around the world to meet together and expand their horizons. Since the beginning, Mercury has attempted to create a community to show off people's talents and bring a wide variety of interests to the table for discussion. Even today it has members from all across the world--from Canada and the United States to the Netherlands, Great Britain, and even Australia. Mercury is an excellent place to get to know people.
Mercury Ice has not been without its troubles. Crystal,
Mercury Ice's founder, decided to move the forums early on, going from Invisionfree to PHPBB on her new host, Kumoko, run by Nyro, under the name of
Mercury. That soon got hacked, so Crystal moved the PHPBB forums to another site, under a friend of hers named Shadow Alex. That was also destroyed, deleted by Alex's host with no explanation. Crystal decided finally that Invisionfree was the place to stay, until Nemphtis of Clan EDGE UK told her about TheIcy. She soon signed up there for free hosting and
Mercury expanded to a website.
Thanks to a competition at
Admin Fusion, Crystal and company won $250, with which they purchased a vBulletin license. They then had to pay for Invisionfree to make them a backup so they could move the forums. This happened in October 2006.
After a while, Iceman handed over TheIcy to Icepick, who managed the site poorly. It started getting attacked by malware and eventually Icepick shut down the site. He wasn't going to even tell his members the site was getting shut down but a moderator convinced him of doing so. He still shut the place down early and Crystal lost all the forum and topsite information. She had to restart the forums from scratch, though she could keep her vBulletin license, and thanks to Koby of
Forgotten Memories, she was able to be hosted on the Kametsu server.
Once that was set up, Krys volunteered to help and Crystal made her an administrator. Later, in August of 2007, Retropusso joined the crew as a moderator, and in December of 2007, KatieKat and Cryssychu were made Roleplaying Moderators. Later still, Dinowoman was added to the staff as a moderator for the Art & Design forums.
Mercury was renamed
Mercury Ice in June of 2008, when Koby's account was hacked and his host locked his account. Crystal's boyfriend Michael offered to pay for her own hosting, and she agreed. They moved the site and started the forums over with the new name. Retropusso and Fritz resigned due to personal problems, but Dinowoman, KatieKat, and Cryssychu all stayed on staff. In June 2009, Cryssychu stepped down as Roleplaying Moderator and Zeth replaced her.
In December 2009,
Mercury Ice moved from Joomla to vBulletin 4.0, which included a CMS section.
Each of the site's layouts have been found on a vBulletin modification site and edited by various
Mercury Ice members.
MERCURY ICE'S GOALS
Mercury Ice's goals are threefold: to bring as many people together as possible, to give every artist a chance to have their work published and to receive exposure, and lastly, to offer enough so that every person has something to relate to. We do this by offering a message board through which members can communicate, a text-based roleplay, and contests and interviews for artists. We are always looking to put more on our site so everyone can participate.
SPECIAL THANKS
Thanks goes to all the members who have stuck with
Mercury Ice through thick and thin, especially those who have added content to the site. A very special thanks goes to Fritz, who has done a lot to help the site expand and stuck with Crystal since the very first time she mentioned she wanted to run a forum and site.
Thanks to Nyro, who originally helped
Mercury Ice gain its strength. She put up with all the files Crystal uploaded and was always the one to help. Also, thanks should go to Alex, for hosting
Mercury temporarily and trying hard to fix the problems with hosting.
Thank you to Iceman and the rest of the kind staff at TheIcy for hosting
Mercury Ice temporarily. Lastly, a big thank you goes to Koby of
Kametsu for hosting
Mercury Ice until the move over to
BlueHost.
Lastly, thank you to Michael for helping pay for hosting.