The CPA

If I remember correctly, I first started playing Magic: the Gathering almost immediately following the release of their introductory Portal product in May of 1997. At first, I mostly just wrangled my younger siblings to play with me. Later I played at the local game store (it was called "The Game Stop" and it was located at 132nd and 240th in Kent) as well as at the after-school game club in Eighth Grade and Ninth Grade. I went to a different high school from my Magic-playing friends and kinda-sorta took a break for several months before finding the Magic players in high school.

The earliest successful online community for the game was "The Dojo." I was there, but not very much. And then it closed down. In the early 00's I looked for other websites to fill that void. I joined a few, some of which I remember. I think all of those sites are now defunct. In 2003 I discovered the Casual Players Alliance. It was an offshoot of The Dojo. I lurked for a bit, then tried to set up an account and join the site. Back then, my household internet was still through AOL, and there was a software issue with AOL that prevented me from setting up my account at the time. I didn't know that AOL was the source of the problem. Not right away. In January of 2004, I had an AIM conversation with the founder of the site and he figured out the source of the problem.

So now I've been a member of the CPA for over sixteen years. It's been a pretty small community for most of that time, but it is, or at least was, the oldest active online Magic community I'm aware of. There are definitely other sites that were spawned from older sites, but until yesterday, I could go to the CPA and see posts written as far back as1999, and even respond to those threads if I wanted to.

I joined the CPA a little before I started the Livejournal that preceded this blog. And I've been one of their most active members. It's kind of been a major part of my life for the past 16 years, but not one that I bring up on this blog, ordinarily. Well, I've written way more there than I ever did here.

Yesterday, someone managed to gain access to an old, abandoned admin account at the CPA, and used this to go on a spree of deleting data. No matter what happens, much of the recent content will probably be lost for good. But I've heard that we may be able to get a backup from last summer restored.