So how did the MooCamp come about then?

What a good question!  Well the simple answer is by accident.  It was never supposed to happen, or at least not in the way that it did.  This is a bit of a work in progress, and might take some time to complete.  It may also be wholly innacurate in places, but it's certainly the truth as I remember it, so if there's anything in here that upsets you, then I'm probably very, very sorry.

Prior to the MooCamp forum, there was a site called The Cowshed.  If you go back even further in our long history, there was another one called FFFF or something similar, but that predates my involvement so I'll not mention it again.  The Cowshed was my first introduction to the crazy world of online MK Dons stuff, and in simple terms, I didn't like it very much.  It looked to me like it was there for the benefit of any AFC Wimbledon fan or sympathiser and it felt like they had carte blanche to do what they wanted on there.  One of the main moderators of the site was a very vocal critic of the club, which really coloured the way the site was run, and it just didn't work for me.

It wasn't that I didn't want to discuss/debate the whole move issue.  I did (and on occasions still do today) but what used to happen on there was that each and every topic relating to current MK Dons stuff got turned into a topic about the move, and any topic that was started about the move got closed.  What I wanted was a site where I could discuss both, but keep them separate, and The Cowshed wasn't it.

I was completely oblivious to the hard work that goes in to running a forum, particularly in as sensitive an environment as the MK Dons, and basically raised a stink with the very patient guy who ran The Cowshed, asking him to change his forum to the way I wanted it to be.  To give him his due, he responded politely, and then after a while of my repeated rantings, he said what he really should have done in the first place.  He said (and I am quoting here) "if you don't like it, foob off and start your own forum".

So I did.  It wasn't that tricky to set up, although if I'd known how much work was involved in the running of a site like this, I can safely say that I would never have gone near it.  I kept it under wraps while I was setting it up, and then once I was happy with it, I told a few friends and asked them to sign up and have a look around.  Other than the few friends that I'd asked to test it out, I wasn't intending to poach people from The Cowshed (and didn't think they'd be interested to be honest - I wasn't joined by too many people in my protests on there, and figured that most people were pretty happy with it) and reckoned that with at the time average home gates of 5,000 or thereabouts, there had to be enough people out there who'd be interested in signing up.

I got about a thousand business cards printed up to be handed out at the Blackpool match, and a handful of willing volunteers helped to pass them out amongst the disinterested throng.  And there it was.  We had a forum that ticked the boxes I wanted to tick, and while there were only a few of us, it was quite a lot of fun.  It was never going to take on the world or anything like that, but it would offer an alternative to The Cowshed, and would hopefully bring some more people into the online world of the Dons.

Anyway, I got a bit of a shock very soon after when dear Mr Badgemaker shut down The Cowshed forum, and suddenly every Dons fan on the web was beating a path to our door, quickly followed by every AFC nr Wimbledon fan and sympathiser.  So much for a quiet life, and any hopes of being the little alternative site dissapeared in that instant.

To be continued...