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As for the lack of artifacts from these earlier sites, it should be remembered that in these pioneering days, due to the lack of space overall, leaving a site meant all files were deleted. Or, where the service didn’t bother removing the old files, an inevitable disk crash on the site would.</p>
==The Site==
<p>
In March of 1998, the home page of the site featured the logo shown on the top of the page, and a very simple but eloquent HTML layout. The links to recent changes, fan fiction, fan art and the message board where very clear and straightforward. The color scheme played on the green color worn by Daria in the series. The site itself was a model of simplicity, something the author complemented the web mistress on many times (this simplicity is very much like the HTML layout of Outpost Daria) and Rowena’s (and later, Martin’s) resistance to making change for the sake of change, while resisting the urge to pollute the environment with “java junk” and animated icons (which didn’t animate so well on a Windows 95 machine with 256K of memory, riding on a Pentium II processor). The fan fiction section was a bit hard to navigate, but this was due in large part with Rowena’s commitment to constantly add new fiction and art in a timely manner. The message board was hosted the “free” message board site, insidethenet.com, and ran largely un-moderated. For a while.</p>
<p>
All and all, the author remembers the site fondly during this period of time. It was digital Garden of Eden, well tended and maintained. But like Planet Daria, there are no artifacts of the original Garden of Eden left today. And for some of the same reasons.</p>
==Ted==
<p>
On March 29, 1998 “The New Kid” premiered on MTV. Featuring Daria’s first “date”, instead of the dream hookup with Trent the fans were all waiting for, it showed instead a clumsy, awkward Daria thrust into a social situation that she didn’t handle well at all. Instead of Daria, triumphant, the fans met, well, themselves. Ted was too much like most prom dates for comfort, or, to male fans, too much like their reflection in the mirror (The author falls into the latter category). There was stunned silence, and then during the ensuing drought, much reflection on if the show had already “jumped the shark”. It would be late June when the next half of the season would be shown, and if any such shark jumping had indeed taken place. There was plenty of time for the fans to get on each other’s nerves.</p>
<p> And they did.</p>
==Boner==
<p>All Eden’s have their snakes, and Planet Daria had one it could call its very own. The screen name was Boner, and this serpent found its way to the message board and started flaming away at many of its inhabitants. Most tried to ignore Boner, but others let him get under their skin. (Boner claimed he was female lesbian of Manchurian ancestry, but his IP address put in a suburb of Bakersfield, CA, and his behavior put him as male, at age 30, still living in his mothers basement). </p>
<p>
Boner had an affinity for Chris Smith, who gave him the attention he craved, and Rowena had to now take time out her already hectic schedule to moderate, and delete entire threads from the message board. Sometimes, due to the flimsy nature of anything labeled “free”, the entire board would be lost, causing much tearing of virtual hair and gnashing of virtual teeth when the board came back up. Updates of the site started falling off, giving Boner a reason to foully attack Rowena, causing more board deletions and more site delays. It was obvious by June of that year something was going to change.</p>
<p> It did. </p>
==The Boyfriend==
<p>
Sometime during this period the denizens of the site learned that Rowena had taken a boyfriend, and soon on the message board, Diezel Monkey made his appearance. It was announced that Planet Daria was moving finally to a paid web hosting service. After shutting down for several days, Planet Daria reemerged anew, on the-wall.net. With greater bandwidth and storage than a free service could provide, Planet Daria began to expand, and started getting the attention of an audience outside of the immediate Daria fan base.</p>
==The Message Board==
<p>
The message board was still on the free site, and now in total chaos. Towards the end of summer, in 1998, Diezel Monkey announced that the free service was going to be discontinued, and a new message board was being constructed by him. This would require a login, and would have strict rules, strictly applied.</p>
<p>
Shortly thereafter, the denizens of the site meekly logged into the new and “improved” site. It was clumsy interface, and hard to use, and certainly different from the board everyone was used to. It only took the author a few minutes to realize that by using the address bar of the browser, he could view the entire source code of the message board. And the unencrypted password file.</p>
<p>
It took Boner and other trolls even less time to discover this. Taking the passwords, he applied these to the (then new service) Hotmail accounts of the denizens of the site, and soon everyone was receiving email from each other telling them exactly what they could do to themselves, with what, and how, with the from line signed by someone they considered a friend. This bubbled up into battles between folks who would normally be non combatants. When cooler heads finally prevailed, many of the original fans were already moving to on greener pastures.</p>
<p>
Diezel Monkey fixed the broken site, and enforced his new, more rigid policies. But Boner and other trolls simply took up the new challenge, changed their screen names and reentered and trashed the place again. Diezel set up password confirmation via email, but the new miracle of Hotmail and other free email sites thwarted this effort. In short, the message board was in a continual state of moderation, and things were no better than they were before.
</p>
==Gifted==
<p>On June 1998, [[Gifted]] aired, and it was once again revealed to the waiting fan base that Daria was not the smartest, most savvy inhabitant of the planet. She was not the intellectual equal of first Ted, and now she was shown to be intellectually equal or behind the students of the gifted school. In the next episode, [[Ill]] a skin rash reduces her to hiding in a bathroom stall. At this stage both Katherine and Wrath officially stopped updating their sites, with Katherine publicly lamenting the lost of quality in the show. Planet Daria remained as the one and only remaining “mega site”. Some fans starts drifting away to other fandoms, but those that remain begin to converge on the only game left in town.</p>
==Contents==
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