Pippa's post about her half-thirteenth anniversary remind me. Last week was the twelfth anniversary of BigCloset.

Did you know that I almost named the site BlueSpider? I was trying to think of a good name that started with a B. :)

Originally, BigCloset was just one department in a site called AtEros. BigCloset was for LGBT stories and I posted my own lesbian erotic fiction there, along with one long TG story I had written. I invited other people to write LGBT fiction and send it to me so I could post it. I also had regular erotica and several writers of erotica sending me stories for the main AtEros site.

Then the first week in December, 1999, Mindy announced that FictionMania would be going away sometime after the first of the year because she was tired of the hassles some people were causing. There were constant flamewars and even email threats. I think, anyway, that's the way I remember hearing about it.

About the same time I started AtEros, and BigCloset as a department on AtEros with it's own sub-domain, Crystal started StorySite as a place to post her own stories. Mindy's announcement prompted both of us to open up our sites and actively start recruiting authors. I got permission from Mindy and several FM authors to move many of their stories to BC which I did. Mindy even gave me permission to copy down all the stories from FM so that all I had to do was get permission from the authors to repost. I'd actually been one of her volunteers, helping to post stories for several months.

In late December, as I remember it, the FM TaskForce was formed to keep FM running after the departure of Mindy. In consideration of the TaskForce's mission, I stopped actively recruiting authors to move their stories to BigCloset and in March of 2000, I decided to take a one month break from the internet to deal with some things in my own life. I kept paying the hosting bills and renewing the domains I owned but I was not active on any site for over a year.

About a year and a half later, I came back to the internet and discovered that BigCloset still got several hundred hits a day. Several hundred hits when it hadn't been updated for nearly two years? Okay, that was intriguing.

Mat Twassel hired me about that time to run his website for him and we put it up as Calendar.ateros.com. Mat's idea was an erotic calendar of stories, vignettes and artwork. We gave it a year. During that year, I also revived BigCloset, rewrote the software and started looking at off-the-shelf software to make running both Calendar and BigCloset.

Crystal had been running StorySite all this time and it had grown a great deal and impressed me with the quality of the writing and the site. And FM was still up and running and growing and had a lot of good stuff being posted. I joined the TaskForce and helped out for awhile but then stopped that since it seemed a conflict to be setting up my own site while working for the TaskForce.

I thought about it a lot. I decided that if I were going to run a website, it would have to be a lot less work than what went into running FM and even StorySite. I tried automating BC with an email-submission system that made me crazy and convinced me that the way to do this was to find something someone else had written so I could concentrate on editorial and not have to mess with writing and maintaining software.

I picked PostNuke as my Content Management System software and set BC up to run on that at about the time Mat decided to abandon Calendar. I ran Calendar for a month or so more but finally just let it be a static site with no more updates. This was near the end of 2003.

The PostNuke version of BigCloset ran as bigcloset.ateros.com/newstuff. There was a streamlined submission form that let me do a bit of editing before posting a story that someone submitted and I wrote teasers and created artwork for almost everything that got posted.

At this time I realized that BigCloset had turned into a site for TG fiction; NOT TG erotica. Very few of the stories being submitted were erotic in the least. I expanded the categories and keywords available to reflect that the center of the site had become literature rather than erotica.

PostNuke had a comment system and BC rapidly developed a cadre of very active commenters. I enforced a strict no-flame policy and removed comments that seemed argumentative rather than constructive.

I updated the PostNuke software several times but a crisis developed in the community of programmers that maintained the code. Groups of them abandoned PostNuke to "fork" the software and it became obvious that there would be no obvious survivor of the mayhem.

In June 2005, I launched BigClosetr.us/TopShelf using the Drupal software. Drupal had several advantages over PostNuke including better submission procedures, better editing software and a multi-dimensional category system.

With authors able to post their own stories and see them online immediately and edit after posting, BCTS became something that had not really existed before in the world of TG fiction. Authors could really OWN their stories in a way that wasn't true of other sites.

Bob Arnold began helping me with technical aspects of running the site and did so until his death earlier this year. Bob's assistance freed me up to concentrate even more on editorial and moderator tasks.

I wrote "A friendly place to read, write and discuss TG fiction" as the motto and terms-of-service of the website and here we are six-and1/2 years later.

Pippa, it's not just your anniversary, it's TopShelf's anniversary. :) Well, on Tuesday.

Hugs to all,
Erin