_Steve_ - Site Administrator:
I grew up on the Commodore64, after getting it not long after it launched in 1982. It wasn't until 1988 that the first Amiga entered our home - our humble A500. Initially it was used for games playing, but in the years that followed, my brother and I expanded our collection to include A1200s, CDTV, CD32 and more recently, an A4000.

Around 1991, I began to take an interest in music, and started to play around with the various music editing programs available at the time. While at university, I met some guys coding a game for a Blitz Basic competition, and ended up scoring some tunes for it. As it took shape, and new graphics were provided, it was decided to try and make a commercial success of it. Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control, it was pulled a few days before going to be mastered - and became the greatest multi player game never to be released - BlitzBombers.

I joined the AW staff back in the beginning when I stumbled into #Amigaworld one day. After helping DD with some news for the site, I took on the role of News Administrator, and forum support. Once the new site launched, I started off doing similar roles as before, but with the rapid growth of the site, I have taken on a more administrative role, helping with the day to day running of the site, and keeping it the friendly place we originally aimed to create.

MikeB - Site Administrator:
I have been an Amiga user since I bought myself an Amiga 2000 in 1989. As a 12 year old kid at the time especially the great games, Deluxe Paint and also Video editing interested me. Soon after buying a hard drive I came to be an AmigaOS enthusiast and till today I still greatly prefer the freedom and flexibility AmigaOS provides me with.

I joined the Amigaworld.net staff little over half a year ago. Before this I was known within the Amiga community for my Amiga-related OSNews articles. OSNews is a popular OS and general Tech news portal focused mainly at "alternative" operating systems such as AmigaOS, BeOS, Linux, etc. Here's a small story on how and why I joined the Amigaworld.net staff.

Little over a year ago many people, including me, started to notice that the general Amiga portals became more focused at alternative products and that various regulars from other forums started moving onto the already established and popular portals. This gradual process was accompanied with many flame wars and created an un-constructive environment to Amiga supporters, as well as to Amiga community developers and other representatives.

This saddened me and a lot of other people at the time because in our opinion especially the strong Amiga community made the survival of the platform possible. It was clear to me and others that something would need to change! There were clear signs that there was a demand and need for a place on the web where Amiga supporters could calmly discuss the Amiga news without having to deal with endless flame-wars, insults or ridiculing of other people's opinions and believes. For me personally one great example has been the great but sadly demised BeNews community portal. BeNews, at a time when this web site prospered, offered a very constructive and calm environment to the BeOS user community and Be Inc employees often participated in interesting in-depth discussions and were treated with respect and kindness (like I believe everyone should try to behave towards each other).

After this I had many discussions with various people on this topic, but notably also with the owner (and webmaster at the time) of a well established Amiga community web site. We discussed a possible takeover of the web site, but the talks ended fruitlessly due to money-related differences. Sadly the owner also opposed to any of my BeNews inspired ideas like for instance enhancing the communication between Amiga Inc, its partners and the Amiga community. (However I should add that this Webster's current webmaster was already very receptive to my ideas at the time and I have much faith in his goodwill for the community. We regularly exchange emails with each other.)

So after this disappointment I started to look at various alternative efforts and came across Amigaworld.net, which provided well moderated forums, up-to-date news reports and a small bunch of kind and reasonable people to discuss Amiga topics with! Before this Amigaworld was only known to me as a Chat room support web site because David was a member of my webring effort, Amiga Ring. Excited I contacted David and we discussed various ideas and soon after this I joined the team and never felt any regret.

reflect - Site Server Admin:
I got an A500 for Christmas, 1988. Back then I knew nothing about computers, so it was mostly games. In the 90's I started with graphics and animations and I did long and intricate movies. The 1MB memory I had wasn't enough and I had to save my anims to several floppies! In 1993 I sold off my A500 and bought a PC. Since then, I've never been content with computing, and I never picked up graphics or animation again. In early 2002 I just decided to see if Amiga was still alive, and to my surprise it was. In March 2002 there was a big Amiga show here in Gothenburg. I was awestruck at the sheer number of people and the enthusiasm. Shortly thereafter, almost 10 years since I sold off my Amiga, I bought a plain A4000 and started expanding it. I met many people in society that were Amigans too. Me and a friend decided to start a usergroup in the area since one didn't exist. In the name of our usergroup, we've helped out with shows, organized them ourselves and people have come to join our ranks and help out with a burning enthusiasm and the means to get things done. When I look back, it's not much I wish I could have done differently this last year. I do regret going PC though, deeply.

I joined AW about 6 months ago, it was in March, after I saw that they were looking for a server admin. By then I was quite fed up with the flamewars on other sites and was looking for a change, a place of respect. Respect for each other doesn't mean you can't have meaningful and interesting discussions, and that's what we're trying to create here. I had been working for 5 years building and administering large Sun servers with associated disk storage and other nice things such as clusters and so on. Davey immediately put me to work on the server and I fixed a few quirks here and there. Unfortunately, real life caught up with me and I realized I couldn't spend 2 hours a day just doing upgrades, you know how it is. I became an OS4 beta tester in June and that ate up almost all the remaining free time I had. (sorry Davey! ;) ) I mainly joined AW because I saw fellow Amigans that wanted help, and after spending 15 minutes in their chat room you find out about the friendliness there and they try to help you if you ever have problems with your Amiga. During the time that I have visited AW there has been clear improvements and with more and more people joining in, I'm sure it will keep getting better and better!

L8-X - Site Moderator:
I have been an "Amigan" for many years since around 1988 when I saw my first A500 in a shop window in Glasgow. The machine had been setup with the Juggler demo and I fell in love with it straight away. After a few months I bought myself an A500 with kickstart 1.2 after selling my Atari 520ST. I couldn't believe the difference between the two machines, the Amiga was a far more class act altogether it outshone the Atari in every way. I have owned various Amigas through the years mainly A500's and A1200's adding faster CPU's, memory, upgraded ROMs, HD, cd-roms etc trying to keep it as up-to-date as possible. I now own an AmigaOne G4XE and await the release of OS4.

I joined an online forum or two, these were cool places to hang out, but as time passed, I found there was an ever increasing hatred of the present Amiga.Inc. I began to login into these places less and started checking out other forums. I came across Amigaworld and joined on December 2002. I really liked it here, you could get to chat with people without the flames and insults that were prevalent on other the forums. I had found a new home. In February 2003 DaveyD made me a moderator of Amigaworld and along with the other moderators we try to keep the same anti-flame policy that makes Amigaworld a fun and enjoyable place for Amiga users to come to.

Mikey_C - Site Moderator
1993 Was a turning point in my life for me as it was the first year I brought my first Amiga, An A1200 (Race and Chase pack) where I was blown away by the Nigel Mansell intro sound effects (The game itself was a bit flaky though). But it was Pinball Fantasies` Stones and Bones that occupied all my time. My love for computers goes back as far as a Vic-20, then a C64 and then (stupidly) an Amstrad 1512 PC, then an IBM Machine with a 386. I moved onto the Amiga purely because all the best sim games were to be had on there at the time. One year later Commodore went bust. However, I had by that time added a hard disk and discovered Workbench. I couldn’t believe how good the AmigaOS was in comparison to Windows 3.11. I brought an 030/50mhz and that was it, I couldn’t go back to PC. Since then I have put my A1200 in a Tower, PPC, Bvision, etc, etc, etc. And it is still the main computer I use to this very day, every day. I have become such an Amiga Tech Head, that I set up two sites, Amiga Yellow Pages and later Amihoo.com. Tough times in the Amiga scene meant that Amihoo.com had to stop. My interest continues though, as I am involved as chairman of Amiga North Thames user group, Publicist and contributor to Total Amiga Magazine (You subscribed yet?) And of course, I am Joint chief Organiser of the recent WOASE shows in the UK.

I was introduced to Amigaworld by MikeB in March 2003, on an (Amiga Inc/Community M/L list –ACAG). At that time I was getting increasingly fed up at the apparent bias towards Amigas Competitor on another Amiga site. The Shifting of the Site to the competitor’s server, coupled with the announcement of their subsequent sponsorship finally broke the proverbial back and I left, publicly announcing that I was going to AW. Best wishes, etc. I joined Amigaworld as number 264. What I found incredible was that my announcement would have such repercussions. Within days the membership on AW had almost doubled! It seems I was the snowflake that caused the avalanche! On my arrival on Amigaworld, I privately emailed Amiga, Hyperion and Eyetech and asked them for their support of AW. The result is Fleecy`s Q&A`s, Hyperion regularly posting and Eyetech now sponsoring the site. Thanks to everyone’s efforts, not least of all, my fellow moderators/Admins and the maestro himself, David Doyle, Amigaworld is doing well and, at the time of writing, Amigaworld now has 1360 members!

So how did I become a moderator on Amigaworld? Well, Back in April 2003 I discovered IRC (finally) and the #Amigaworld channel, within weeks, of being there, most of the users voted for me to become Channel Op, Which considering how wet behind the ears I was, came as a big surprise! However, given how good AmIRC is, (Thanks to the vapor team) I was soon moderating like the best of them on channel.

I have only been a moderator on Amigaworld.net for about a month, Myself and MikeB have proven to be quite controversial with the Anti-Amiga people, since all we really care about is a community portal that reflects the wishes of it members which are:
· Free from competitor evangelisms
· Free from unnecessary vitriol
· Friendly and flame/troll free

Many outsiders would argue that we don’t want to live in the real world, don’t wish to see alternatives, that we are all locked in a fantasyland etc, etc. Far from it, most members visit the other sites and are aware of what’s going on. Amigaworld serves as their break from the maddening crowd; a home away from all the shouting.

The future? Well given its stance. contributors and members, I believe that Amigaworld will one day be the biggest Amiga Community Portal in the world by far.