User:Ccc/fandomtimeline

The following is a timeline of major events involving the fan community of The Weather Channel.

1995-1999

1995

Weatherscan's national feed from December 2000. This was how the network first appeared when it debuted in July 1998.

• February 2: The Weather Channel launches TWCForum, an official Compuserve-based forum for the purpose of connecting with the network's fans.

1997

• June: Weather Channel fan Matt Marron launches Matt's TWC Music Homepage, an unofficial website covering music found on the network.
  • This site would be the precursor to the current TWC Classics site.

2000-2009

2003

• February 2003 Test

• September 2003: Test

Weatherscan as seen from 2003 until September 27, 2005

• November 26, 2003: Test

2004

• January 10: The first ever Local Across the 48s event, a fan-led online showcase of Local on the 8s segments recorded at the same time across the country, is held on the TWC Classics site.
  • Matt Marron and Charles Abel-Lear collaborated to hold the event as a means to attract new users to the site following a rebrand.
• February: Test
• August: Test

2005

• February 21: Closed beta testing begins for version two of the Weather Star 4000 Simulator.
• April 30: Version two of the Weather Star 4000 Simulator is released as a public beta test.

• July: Test

Weatherscan IntelliStar as seen from September 27, 2005, until December 12, 2006

• September 27: Test

• December: Test

2006

• March: Test
• April: Test
• May 12: Test
• August: Test
• December 12: Test

2007

• April 16: Charles Abel-Lear establishes his YouTube channel, The Weather Chazz.
• June 25: TWC Today, the largest site and forum dedicated to The Weather Channel, is founded by Gary Turner, Jr.
• June 26: New videos are added to TWC Today's user-submitted content page as an expansion to the newly-founded site.
• June 27: Only two days after the creation of TWC Today, a board covering contemporary TWC topics is added to the TWC Classics forum, which causes controversy between the two owners.
  • Turner eventually allows the board to remain, but he discusses the matter with some of his forum members, who agree that the change would hurt TWC Today in the long run. Nonetheless, Turner upholds his decision to keep peace between the sites.
• ~December: Another feud breaks out between the ownership of TWC Today and TWC Classics, this time largely on the side of TWC Classics over planned changes to TWC Today's content that "blur the lines" between the content of the two sites.
  • This strained relationship between the two sites remains until February 6 of the following year.
  • Few other details remain available about the feud.

2008

• February 6: In a compromise that ends the roughly two-month-long feud between TWC Classics and TWC Today, all boards on the TWC Classics forum covering contemporary TWC topics are merged into one board that points to TWC Today for further discussion; TWC Today adds a classic TWC topics board that points to TWC Classics for further discussion.
  • Matt Marron comes up with this compromise entirely on his own, much to Gary Turner, Jr.'s liking.
• June 18: TWC Central, a smaller fandom forum founded by Andrew Poecker, moves to a new site.
  • The forum was founded sometime prior to this date, but any information about the original version of the forum remains lost. This is the first concrete date still remaining in relation to TWC Central.

• December 19: The SilverStar 8 project, a Weather Channel-like livestream project led by Andrew Poecker, is covered in an article by the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon.
  • The article describes Poecker, still quite young at the time, as a "weekend meteorologist" who leads a team of other young weather enthusiasts hoping "to get cable companies to subscribe to the service," including their local cable company, Wave Broadband.
• December 25: The aforementioned news article on the SilverStar 8 project is posted to the TWC Today forums.
  • The article leads to controversy, with at least a few vocal users complaining about the project and its young members' lack of qualifications, with some members of the project themselves even criticizing the article and some of the information that was reported to the journalist, including fabricated titles.

2009

• February: Test
• April 27: Gary Turner, Jr. announces that unless a new owner can take over TWC Today, the site will close on or around May 13.
  • Turner cites recently moving, an increase in social focus, business focus, finances, and a waning interest in contemporary TWC as reasons for the potential closure.
  • Martin Cornick considers the position of owner and head administrator.
• April 28:
  • Cornick submits an offer to take ownership of TWC Today; Turner accepts the offer.
  • Turner steps down as owner and head administrator of TWC Today and hands control of the site to Cornick.
• October 20: A USA Today article breaks the news that The Weather Channel will begin airing a Friday night movie block; the news spreads to TWC Today the same day.
  • The block is met with mixed attitudes on TWC Today. Some are open to the idea, while others believe it continues the trend away from 24-hour weather coverage.
• Mid-November: Jason McGill (also known as BOLT96), a fan already active in other TWC fan communities, founds the WeatherSTAR Emulator Forum in an attempt to provide a central hub for Weather Star simulation projects.

2010-2019

2010

Current Weatherscan design, before TWC logo removal.

• ~March-May: Somewhere during this time, development staff for the Weather Star 4000 Simulator contact Dan Chandler, former voice talent for The Weather Channel, attempting to solicit his help in rerecording Weather Star 4000 narrations.
  • It would be around a year after this first message that Chandler responded and agreed to record new narrations for the simulator.
• March 11: Test
• May 24: Test
• July 27: Test
• September 8: BOLT96 releases a simulator of the Weather Star XL-based original version of Weatherscan Local as a public beta to registered users of the WeatherSTAR Emulator Forum.
• October 1: The TWC Classics 2003 and 2005 forums are deleted due to lack of data space.
  • BOLT96 keeps an archive of the forums.

2011

• June 29: Test

2012

• June 11: The wxTV YouTube channel is established.

2014

• June 21: The Triple C TWC YouTube channel is established.
• September 30: After years of inactivity, BOLT96 announces the closure of all projects related to his WeatherSTAR Emulator Forum, with the forum remaining accessible but inactive.

2015

• March 5: Test
• March 25: The first version of The Weather Chat, a fan-operated direct messaging group chat dedicated to The Weather Channel and meteorology in general, is established by wxTV and Velitacast on the social media platform Kik.
• April 5: wxTV and Velitacast publicly announce that they are joining forces to create new Star simulation videos.
• October 30: Martin Cornick, owner and head administrator of TWC Today, passes away after an illness at the age of 24.
• November 18: The Weather Chat transitions to a Telegram Messenger-based group, moving away from its original Kik channel.

2016

• April: The Weather Channel establishes We Love Weather as an official website and forum dedicated to fans of the network and meteorology in general.

• May 14: Test

• July: Test

2017

• October 4: The Weather Chat moves from Telegram Messenger to Discord.
  • Arguments and controversies between users are the primary cause of the move.
  • The new version of The Weather Chat is a much smaller and select group.
• November 25: Triple C TWC establishes a Discord group chat of the same name for his YouTube channel's fan community.

2018

• February 8: TWCKelby establishes TWC Archive, a wiki-based encyclopedia with the purpose of documenting information related to The Weather Channel, its programming, its major personalities, its fandom, its technology, major events, and other related topics.
  • At time of creation, TWC Archive was released to a limited group of contributors in preparation for a larger release with more refined content on the platform.
• April 22: The Weather Chat on Discord closes.
• December: THEtechknight purchases a Weather Star 4000 from eBay, setting a series of events into motion that will lead to the reverse engineering of the system.

2019

• June 18: The Triple C TWC Community Discord server migrates to a new server.
• June 30: Two members of the We Love Weather forum, ArsenalFan and AndyMoserWeather, begin fighting over the latter's profile picture, which featured a cereal box with the logo of the English football club Arsenal superimposed on it.
  • This forum thread begins an infamous feud between the two users that would sour the atmosphere of the forums and would ultimately last for around a year and a half, all the way until the We Love Weather forums close in February 2021.
• November 6: Charles Abel-Lear, beloved and respected longtime personality within The Weather Channel's fan community, passes away unexpectedly at the age of 39.
• December 25: After months of reverse engineering, THEtechknight runs the first full local forecast on the Weather Star 4000 since the retirement of Star 4000 systems in 2014.
  • This local forecast run utilized the original primitive text-based appearance of the 4000 circa 1990.

2020-2024

2020

• March 1: THEtechknight runs the first fully graphical local forecast on the Weather Star 4000 since his reverse engineering efforts began.

2023

• February 7: Dan Chandler, former Weather Channel voice talent who made connections with the community and contributed narration to the Weather Star 4000 Simulator, passes away at the age of 84.
• ~February 12: The We Love Weather website finally closes after just over two years of complete inactivity.

2024

• April 16: Public downloads for the Weather Star 4000 Simulator are suddenly removed from Taiganet.
  • Developer Bill Goodwill claims that recent website and data outages are the result of malicious acts at the site where Taiganet's server is located.
  • The news causes a significant stir both inside and outside the TWC fan community, especially on Twitter, concerning the future of the simulator.
  • The news is primarily discussed within the community on the Triple C TWC Discord.
• May 9: Following the Taiganet website experiencing an extended downtime, Triple C TWC organizes an archival effort to save the contents of the forums.
  • Archival efforts for the Taiganet website and simulator on the Triple C TWC Discord server are centralized at this point.