Eirtaku About Eirtaku

The Past

1998?
Eirtaku was formed by anime fans, which were mostly based in Cork. They had a forum on ezBoards I think it was, and had maybe around 10 reasonably active members. They also had a site which doesn't seem to work anymore. They also organised some meetups, etc.

January 2002
I requested a manga and anime forum on boards.ie so that I could talk to other Irish anime fans. I didn't know about the existence of Eirtaku, whose forum was losing inertia, maybe due to people losing interest, and errr 'artistic differences' amongst some members.
Cloud, from boards.ie fame, gave me and Mordeth an "Ireland" forum in his newer site mangatoanime.com which was beginning to grow pretty fast.

March? 2002
Both the Ireland forum and the Eirtaku forum weren't very active, so we decided to merge them here on mangatoanime.com. We kept the same people as moderators, so it was Mordeth and me from mangatoanime.com and Kago from Eirtaku as mods.
Not everyone from Eirtaku made the switch over though, but we got new members every few weeks, usually people finding their way over from boards.ie.

January 2003
We created the #eirtaku IRC (chat) channel on QuakeNet, which is still the central reunion point for a lot of us.

February 2003
Slydice, who was in the web-development business, decided to purchase the Eirtaku.com domain and hand it over to me, to put a basic site up. So that's what I did, and almost a year later, I am taking (slow) steps to improve it.

The Present

Eirtaku is probably the only Irish forum on the web, and it's currently the only country-specific forum on mangatoanime.com. Although anyone is welcome to post, it is mainly geared toward Irish people.

Eirtaku hopefully represents a fair amount of the anime community in Ireland, and it can hopefully help anime fans inform each other of what is happening in relation to anime in Ireland.
Feel free to make a new thread about *any* topic you want to discuss with other Irish anime fans.

I think anime is becoming more mainstream every day, and there are always new fans wanting to experience more things than Ireland's crap resources allow them to. Here's a link to a new site, unrelated to eirtaku, made for/by Irish anime fans: http://animeireland.cjb.net/

The Future

This is where I'd like some user input from whoever reads this. I'm the moderator of the forum, and the webmaster for eirtaku.com, but I don't want to be the only one that decides the fate of Eirtaku. I think there's a lot more that could be done, with some added effort. Have any ideas? Feel free to post them here!
I'd also be interested in knowing how everyone found eirtaku, we've had a lot of people join over the last 2 weeks or so.

P.S.: My memory is quite bad so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong or if you want to add more information I have forgotten about.