Sonic Retro
Template:Infobox Website Sonic Retro (formerly known as SSonicNET Database, Sonic the Hedgehog Information Treasury (SHIT) and the Sonic Retro Info Wiki) is a free content encyclopedia written collaboratively by contributors from around the world. It attempts to form a complete knowledge base for everything to do with Sonic the Hedgehog. The site is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit articles, simply by clicking on the "edit this page" link. It's the site you're looking at right now. The site currently has 195 articles.
History[edit]
In mid-2004, scener LocalH brought up the idea of having a scene database similar to the Commodore 64 Scene Database, but for the Sonic hacking and research scene, to the staff of Sonic Classic and SSonicNET. On September 14, 2004, the SSonicNET Database was founded by Alexbt as a possible test project for Local H's vision. At that point, MediaWiki sites were not as common as they are today, and there were few if any Sonic-related wikis. With the early effort of some Sonic Classic staff members, the site grew into "SHIT" (Sonic the Hedgehog Information Treasury).
In March 2005, newly adminned staffer Scarred Sun made an offer to Sonic McTails, then-head of SSonicNET to purchase SSonicNET because of a series of disputes the two had concerning the running of the SSonicNET Database. McTails declined the offer, and a plan to move the Sonic Classic forums and SHIT off McTails' server went ahead. On Friday, March 18, 2005, after hosting was finally granted, SClassic and SHIT made an impromptu switch to http://www.sclassic.net (now defunct.) SHIT was the first site on the new Sonic Classic to fully make the transition.
In May 2006, SHIT, Sonic Classic, and Sonic Hot Dimensions, the three main hostees of sclassic.net, were combined under the "Sonic Retro" moniker in order to help promote crosstraffic. After two months, due to infighting between the staffs of SClassic and SHD, the merger dissolved, and because of differing interests, Sonic Classic and SHIT went their separate ways in fall 2006. With that, SHIT absorbed the Sonic Retro name and became simply "Sonic Retro."
In July 2007, the whole of CulTNET went down, and The Sonic 2 Beta Page went with it. After a period of downtime, ScarredSun finally agreed to host the site on the Sonic Retro server. She and Tweaker got to talking, and realized that the two sites had remarkably similar userbases. It was therefore decided that they should be merged. Scarred Sun made the announcement in September. The S2Beta forums would replace the old Retro forums, while the main site would be copied over to the wiki (though all the old pages would still exist at their old locations). This decision was met with mixed views, with Nineko, Metal_Man88 and Guess_Who in particular being highly opposed to the merge. Guess_Who left the forums immediately after the merge was executed, although he returned almost a year afterwards. While Nineko seemed to no longer have any qualms about it, Metal_Man88 remained vaguely annoyed at the merger, at least until it began to benefit the forums directly. (Now that he is staff, it is quite obvious it does not persist.)
Awards and Accolades[edit]
In 2005, Sonic Retro was nominated for several Sonic Site Awards, winning the Most Evolved Website award. At the time of the awards, Sonic Retro had gone from non-existence to over 1,000 articles.
Current Staff[edit]
- ScarredSun - Owner
- Tweaker - Administrator
- Hivebrain - Administrator
- Xkeeper - Administrator
- Overlord - Forum moderator
- Aquaslash - Forum moderator
- Chimpo - Forum moderator
- Black Squirrel - Wiki sysop
- Frozen Nitrogen - Wiki sysop
- MathUser - Wiki sysop
- nineko - Wiki sysop
- GeneHF - Site staff
- Slingerland - Site staff
- Cinossu - Forum leader (Engineering and Reverse Engineering)
- jman2050 - Forum leader (Engineering and Reverse Engineering)
- drx - Forum leader (Prototype Discussion)
- Blue Streak - Forum leader (Sonic 2 HD)
- Canned Karma - Forum leader (Sonic 2 HD)
- Sciz - Forum leader (Sonic 2 HD)
- Vincent - Forum leader (Sonic 2 HD)
- FraGag - Forum leader (Community SVN Project)