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PERSONAL PROFILE

The Amazon Basin community was founded by me, James R. Broome. I am 36 years old and live with my lovely wife and two sons in Tampa, Florida.

I have never had formal computer or web design training - I'm pretty much self taught. My skills (yeah, right) in HTML coding are all thanks to having to keep this site up and running. When I want to do something I don't know how to do, I look it up, buy a book, or ask lots of questions. What started as stuff coded by my two crummy hands has since turned into a site with a small handful of tech volunteers coding and recoding software to get it to do what we need it to. As generic as most of this place looks on the surface, there are months and months of coding work all going on behind the scenes helping to keep our 'safe haven' safe.

In August of 2000, I was WAY into the newly released Diablo II. I played a Rogue in Diablo, so I immediately took to the Amazon in Diablo II. Much of my time learning about the strategies of playing an Amazon were spent in the diabloii.net Amazon Strategy Forums. The great minds of the time met there constantly. Vehementi (the founder of the Bowazon) suggested someone create an Amazon-only guild so we could all hang out together. No one ever took him seriously on this, so I decided to.

The Amazon Basin was officially created on August 11, 2000. What started on a freebie web space account (5MB) quickly outgrew its home. It has changed hosts more times than I'd like to recall. My wife has complained about the time I spend in the office playing with the site more often than I'd like to discuss. Before long, The Amazon Basin had become one of the 'big 3' Diablo II sites on the web (diabloii.net and Arreat Summit being the other two).

I could take up more of your time recalling the history of The Amazon Basin, but there is no reason - I've already written it.

THE STAFF

Other than myself, I have a small group of people I trust with admin accounts and passwords to take care of things when I can't. Some are around because they know their stuff way better than I do. Others are around because they have obtained some pretty nasty information about my private life that I don't dare allow them to share (and I have no choice but to give them all the power they want).

ZenDragon

Mr. Dragon is quite gifted. He's always fighting for what is right and what will benefit the community. Although he is an old-timer, he's got mad skillz. I turn to him all the time when I can't figure things out. He is The Basin's knight in shinning armor when it comes to server/Linux stuff. Our 3 day outage in 2001 would have lasted months if it wasn't for him.

nlx3647

This guy is our Linux super-genius. If it needs to be done using a command line, nlx is all over it. He has a extremely solid understanding of RedHat and has been known to pull all-nighters cleaning up messes on our server.

AllWeasel

AllWeasel is the founding father of WeaselTech™. He has bailed us out numerous times and is always willing to go the extra mile when it comes to our host, PHP, MySQL, Invision Board, troll-sniffing tools, and general coding crap. I'll have to keep him around, at least until someone else tells me what databases are and how they work.

TECHNICAL INFO

Our community is housed on a 3 GHz Pentium 4 Linux box with 2GB RAM located in the data center of GoDaddy. This setup costs about $130 a month and is paid for through donations and sales from our BasinWear store. As of right now, we have no need to run banner or pop-up ads as the donations and sales more than take care of us. We plan to stay advertising free for as long as we can.

As of July 2007 we averaged about 6,000 visitors and approximately 250,000 hits every day.

Our users post approximately 560 messages total on our six forums every single day.

Thanks for reading,
TPJ
Founder, The Amazon Basin

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The Amazon Basin Community
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