History of CentralChat

Before CC (Late 1999)

The founders of CentralChat were chatting on a network called "ByteCenter", but the owners of 3 major channels had a major disagreement with the owner of ByteCenter who then closed the chatrooms in question. We had to move elsewhere, and that's when CentralChat was born.

The early days (April/May 2000)

CentralChat was founded around about April 2000 by 12-year-old Drew, who originally just used his parents computer as the chat server and web server. Several people joined Drew's team to create CentralChat. Laurence negotiated with several webmasters (who, between them, owned 3 chat rooms) to offer them chatrooms on our server, they all agreed to move here, although with just #harrypotter we were overloaded at peak times. The other rooms had to wait before they could move...

CentralChat evolves (June/July 2000)

Drew opened a Shellux account on 3rd June 2000, which enabled us to expand. #stfc and #ycfc moved almost immediately. The domain name centralchat.net was registered on 17th June 2000. Work started on the website, and CentralChat was getting bigger every day. A computer program called CC-Bot was created (mostly during July) to provide trivia in various chatrooms, protect against flooding etc. The Harry Potter rooms were by far our most popular (because of the link from the UHPFC), and we created additional Harry Potter chatrooms to cope with the demand.

CentralChat upgraded, website online (August 2000)

During August 2000, the server was upgraded so that all the official CentralChat rooms (and optionally for non-CC rooms, at the webmasters discretion), any profanity would not be shown in those rooms, so now people cannot swear in any room that has this mode (+G) set.

An application for the domain centralchat.co.uk was placed on 31 August and a beta version of the website was also being tested on the same day. The domain was fully registered by 1st September, and on the same day the website was pretty much complete, and uploaded.

Website/Server improvements (September/October 2000)

Thanks to feedback from several people, the CentralChat website was improved upon and became good enough to add to search engines and web directories by 11th September. Until now, all the webmasters who use our applets were contacted individually, but soon this will change, and we won't be a server for just Harry Potter fans and fans of a few English 3rd Division football clubs. The future of CentralChat was looking bright, but impossible to predict.

Server change (November/December 2000)

CentralChat were extremely disappointed with the performance of Shellux who provided us with our IRCd shell. We also have low amounts of disk space, etc. Unfortunately, Shellux had to close down due to the FBI stealing their server! We were going to leave Shellux anyway, but we had not yet found a replacement. To make matters worse, we'd ran out of money. CentralChat was offline for 3 weeks while we got funding in place for a new server, this eventually happened with about 4 staff members paying for the server out of their own pockets.

CentralChat Forms a new network (September 2002)

CentralChat had many problems with one of the former staff members who then departed from CentralChat and started another network. Some people followed him, but CentralChat survived. We still have the original founders of CentralChat and we are sure that we will continue to improve.

Website re-design (October 2002)

CentralChat's website had lasted for over 2 years without a re-design, so it was about time we changed it. We hope you like the new look!

Update (March 2005)

CentralChat continues to expand and grow as more people join's CentralChat's network of chatrooms and discussion boards.

CentralChat is active once more! (March 2007)

Due to several incidents with former staff members and a lack of active maintenance, the user count has been steadily decreasing for some time. CentralChat now has active staff members and is back on track to becoming a great IRC network and Webmaster community. The Web site, which has served us well for four and a half years, has been redesigned to better serve the users of CentralChat.