Community:Zelda Dungeon

Zelda Dungeon is a Legend of Zelda fan website created by Mases Hagopian on August 19th, 2001. The site's main purpose is to provide the most in-depth game guides possible, utilizing screenshots, maps, and artwork. The site is part of the Telefragged / Atomic Gamer network. As a part of this network, Zelda Dungeon has a media section on the 3ddownloads file server. Zelda Dungeon has recently launched a new message board, The Dark World. Zelda Dungeon was the recipient of the Golden Mirror Shield Award in 2008.

=History= Zelda Dungeon has been around for over 7 years, and during this long period of time, there have been plenty of ups and downs. Below is a detailed account of the creation and history of Zelda Dungeon.

Conception
Mases Hagopian originally gained interest in the Zelda series after playing A Link to the Past for the Super Nintendo. Years later, Mases obtained a copy of Ocarina of Time and his interest in the series had grown. Leading up to the release of Majora's Mask in the year 2000, Mases first became involved in the online Zelda community, frequently visiting the Zelda fan website known as Zelda Power. During the summer of 2001, Mases thought of the idea of creating his own Legend of Zelda website where he could provide written strategy guides for all of the Zelda games. This idea came to fruition near the end of the summer of 2001.

Layout 1.0 - The Early Days
The site launched on August 19th, 2001 and was originally hosted at Yahoo Geocities free hosting service. The site initially launched as part of a network of sites about several other gaming and TV show series', including Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Dark Cloud, and Dragonball Z. The Zelda portion of the site was solely run by Mases during its first few months.

This early era didn't last long, and by October of 2001, all of the network sites had gone inactive and only Zelda Dungeon remained. This primitive version of Zelda Dungeon had very minor amounts of game content, and it was in October of 2001 that Mases began work on the Ocarina of Time Walkthrough. After about a month of work, Mases was beginning to lose interest in working on the site, based on the fact that there were no incoming in visitors. Activity came to a complete halt until January 2nd, 2003, when Zelda Dungeon was first listed on the Google search engine. For the first time, consistent visitors began to flow into Zelda Dungeon. While such a tiny number in retrospect, the site was receiving 5-10 visitors per day, and this caused work to presume on Zelda Dungeon. The site got its first affiliate in City of Clocktown, an aspiring website at the time, and Mases became very close friends with the Webmaster of City of Clocktown. Zelda Dungeon continued to rack up more affiliates, and the growing amount of content at the website was beginning to set in. With the help of the Webmaster of City of Clocktown, Mases setup an account at shorturl, and the sites much easier to remember url was now zeldadungeon.vze.com.

Controversy hit Zelda Dungeon during this early period, when Mases was directly linking to media files that were hosted by the website, Zelda Power. Mases, being the ignorant Webmaster at the time, could not comprehend that this was illegal. However, in response to these new audio files that were hosted at the website, more visitors began to come to the forum. After a few weeks, Mases was contacted by Aaron Holt, Webmaster of Zelda Power, and was asked to remove the direct links to Zelda Power's media.

Layout 2.0 - HTML Conversion
On March 27th, 2002, Zelda Dungeon launched Layout version 2.0, and it was the first layout that was built with html code. The layout was built by the Webmaster of City of Clocktown. Prior to this layout, Zelda Dungeon was built with a yahoo geocities site builder. With the introduction of HTML coding, plenty of new pros and cons came with transition. One of the pros was that the website was now consistent throughout all the pages of the website. However, going along with this change, each games index page was no longer visually unique as it was in the websites first layout.

Two versions of this layout were actually released. Upon release, version 2.0 had a listing of all the Zelda games along the navigation, and every specific page of content for each of the games was also listed. This worked well at the layouts launch, as there were so few content pages, and it skipped extra steps of having to go to a games index page to get to the game content. However, as the website began to grow and new pages were constantly added, the left navigation was getting quite lengthy. Additionally, because of the primitive coding that the site was using, after every new page or affiliate was added, every single page of the website had to be altered, and this was one of the cons of the initial switchover to html.

Several months into the layouts existence, version 2.5 was launched. The noticeable difference was the game menu on the left navigation. It was now compacted so that it only listed the actual games and did not list the individual content pages. The website went through another coding change, and was now using shtml. What shtml did, was allowed the navigation bars to be adjusted without having to go through and edit every single page when a single link was changed. This made editing the website a lot more efficient and more time was now focused on the content of the website, rather than the coding.

It was also during this layout where Zelda Dungeon was beginning to put its stamp on the online Zelda community. The site was growing rapidly, and yahoo geocities was no longer large enough for Zelda Dungeon. At the end of each month, Zelda Dungeon was being taken offline due to overuse of the sites bandwidth. After searching online for other free hosts that were more reliable, Mases stumbled upon a website known as Zelda Odyssey, which was part of the Chatville network. After contacting them, Zelda Dungeon was accepted for hosting, and moved to this new network. Hosting was no longer an issue at this point in time, which allowed the website to further grow.

During this time frame, Zelda Dungeon hired its first ever staff member, Steph. Steph originated at a Zelda website known as Link's Domain, a website which closed when its host, E-Zelda had closed down. After seeing her work and seeing the closure of the Link's Domain, Mases contacted Steph and offered her a job at the website, where she officially became a staff member on October 27th, 2002. Steph ended up creating much of the Adventure of Link content at the time, and had set a new standard of content for Zelda Dungeon. Steph was at the website for several months before leaving her position behind. Almost all of her content has since been replaced, but Steph still leaves behind a legacy of being the first staff member at Zelda Dungeon.

Zelda Dungeon had picked up numerous affiliates during the lifespan of Layout #2, including large Zelda websites at the time such as Zelda Guide, Link's Legacies, and Zelda Central. Victor of Zelda Central became one of the members of the community to which Mases looked up to and admired. Victor helped Mases with coding whenever it was needed, and is a big reason for the sites growth during this time frame.

Layout 3.0 - Hosting Issues
Victor of Zelda Central had grown to be close friends with Mases, and seeing the sites potential, he offered to create Zelda Dungeon a brand new layout. On November 23rd, 2002, layout 3.0 was launched and it was a huge upgrade over layout 2.0, and gave the website a much better first appeal for new visitors. Several noticeable changes could immediately be seen with the new layout, including the first official banner that the website had at the top of the layout. In previous layouts, there was just simply a line of text stating the websites name, but now a traditional banner was in place including the sites name and artwork from the Zelda franchise. The site took upon a slightly different name with the shift to layout 3.0. The site was always referred to as The Zelda Dungeon, but with the new layout, 'the' was dropped from the website title and it was not simply referred to has Zelda Dungeon. Other changes with the layout include the more distinctive split up of the various sections on each of the navigation bars.

Our host, Zelda Odyssey, was beginning to experience downtime more frequently, and this caused Zelda Dungeon to also experience downtime. The Webmaster of Zelda Odyssey was neglecting his website, and little was done when the website would occasionally go offline for extended periods of time. With the sites growth being stunted because of hosting issues, Mases began looking elsewhere in the Zelda community for other websites that offered free hosting. Mases contacted Lars-Christian, Webmaster of Zelda Universe and applied for hosting. On December 14th, 2002, Zelda Dungeon's application was accepted and the transition to a new home had begun. Zelda Universe unfortunately did not support shtml at the time, and this caused the transition process to be a bit more difficult. Zelda Dungeon abandoned shtml, and shifted towards php, of which remains the primary coding system of the website today. Little was changed in the actual coding, outside of just minor adjustments to the coding of each individual page.

One of the luxuries of being hosted by Zelda Universe, was the large influx of fans that began pouring into the website. Zelda Universe was one of the largest Zelda websites online during this time, and thus, a lot of traffic came to Zelda Dungeon. The site was receiving more visitors during this time, than it had in any point throughout its brief history.

This growth in visitors to the website, made Mases realize that it was now time for the site to take the next step forward and acquire a domain name. Unfortunately, Mases was still inexperienced with much of the duties of a Webmaster and had little knowledge as to how to purchase and setup a domain name. Mases ended up applying for a domain name at acidmist.com, a website that offered free domain names. Zelda Dungeon was accepted, and the new primary url for the website was now, zeldadungeon.com. The domain name allowed members to more easily recognize the websites name and be able to access it in a simpler fashion.

In March of 2003, Zelda Dungeon once again contacted acidmist, and this time applied for the free hosting package the website offered. Acidmist offered free hosting in exchange for the placement of a small banner advertisement at the top of each page of the website. Zelda Dungeon was accepted and in March of 2003 left Zelda Universe and found its new home at Acidmist. Leaving Zelda Universe slowed the growth process of Zelda Dungeon, but the long term effects were clearly seen. Zelda Dungeon was now on its own, and no longer under the shadow of being a hosted website of another Zelda site.

Layout 4.0 - A New Co-Webmaster
Zelda Dungeon released Layout version 4.0 on May 3rd, 2003. This layout was the first and only website that was not actually created by Mases, a staff member, or an online friend. Instead, Mases found this layout online from a website known as Free Layouts. The site offered a bunch of free layout templates that could be freely used by anybody who runs a website. The layouts color scheme was drastically different than the previous two white layouts, and overall, it had a much darker feel to it. After the initial release of the layout, Mases found that there was another, much smaller website, using the exact same layout template found at Free Layouts. This fact, along with the lack of uniqueness that the layout had, caused the layout to not be much of a hit with the frequent visitors of the website and Mases himself.

After Steph became the first staff member of Zelda Dungeon a year earlier, the website hired numerous staff members to write content, post news on the sites index page, write articles and editorials, but none of these staff members ever ended up sticking around for more than a couple weeks. On May 3rd, the same day as the launch of layout 4.0, Mases hired a new staff member who went by the alias of Cartoons. Upon his hiring, Cartoons was treated as a normal staff member at the time, and was assigned to work on content projects for the Ocarina of Time as well as some material for the Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages. After being told which parts of the website that he would work on, Cartoons worked very hard and efficiently and just mere hours after being assigned this material, his first content pieces were ready to go online.

Mases saw this dedication that Cartoons had for the website, and this led to a close bond being formed between Mases and Cartoons. Over the next several months of the websites existence, updates became very frequent, content was being added on a near daily basis, and the sites visitors were experiencing record highs. On August 18th of 2003, the eve of the websites second birthday, Zelda Dungeon hit the mark of 1000 visitors in a single day. This achievement was reached by the hard work over the Summer of 2003 by Mases and Cartoons. Later this year, rewarding him of his hard work, Cartoons was promoted to a Webmaster role at Zelda Dungeon.

It was also during this time period, that the first ideas of a Zelda Dungeon Forum were being toss around. Mases was reluctant to create his own forum, as he felt it would be distracting from growth of the actual website, and because of the relative youth of Zelda Dungeon, would not become much of a success. However, Mases began seeing the importance of giving a fan base a place to discuss, and formed the first of what became a series of partnered forums. Rather than attempting to create his own forum, Mases agreed to link to existing forums of various affiliate websites of Zelda Dungeon. This idea held strong for quite awhile, until Zelda Dungeon attempted its first forum at a later point in time.

Layout 5.0 - Green Return
Layout 5.0 was released on November 25th, 2003. The layout was created by Avenged, who at the time, was the Webmaster of a Zelda website known as Zelda Chronicles. The website marked the return of the green color scheme that was seen in Layout 1.0. The sidebars took a look which was similar to that of Layout 2.0, and scrapped the boxed sections along the navigation bars that were seen in layout 3 and 4. The layout was filled with dozens of variations of the color green, and this could be seen with a quick glance of the index page. There were very few images within the layout, and this allowed the green background to really stand out.

During the time period of this layout, Zelda Dungeon was able to affiliate with Zelda Power, one of the biggest inspirations for Mases throughout the creation and growth of Zelda Dungeon.

The site continued grow in content and size, parleying the growth from Layout 4 to reach even new heights. However, towards the end of this layouts lifespan, a stunt to the growth of Zelda Dungeon occurred once again because of hosting problems. Acidmist had been a great website for free hosting and a free domain name, but a big downfall was the poor technical support that was offered, and the reluctance of them to comply with the needs of their clients. In this case, Zelda Dungeon had outgrown the hosting package that acidmist offered, and towards the end of each month, the site was reaching its bandwidth limits and the site was coming offline.

This layout did see the hiring of a brand new staff member, Metalmallow. Metalmallow was hired by Cartoons to help Zelda Dungeon in the graphics field. Metalmallow created dozens of messenger icon, wallpaper images, avatars, and more. Metamallow never wrote content, but was used often behind the scenes at the website on various projects that Mases and Cartoons were working on.

Layout 6.0 - ZeldaDungeon.net
During the rough stretch towards the end of the lifespan of Layout 5.0, Zelda Dungeon also hired a new staff member to help produce a brand new layout. This new staff member began creating layout 6.0, but never quite finished before he vanished from the website. It is not known exactly what happened to this member or to where this member went off to, but the layout was not quite complete. Mases and Cartoons had all the various images that went with the layout, but it was only partially coded when the creator left. This made Cartoons and Mases slowly piece together the layout, which at the time was quite difficult given the primitive knowledge that both Mases and Cartoons had with coding. After nearly three weeks of the site going without an update, Layout 6.0 was launched on March 30th, 2004. It was the first of all the Zelda Dungeon layouts to be created and hand coded by members of the Zelda Dungeon staff.

The hosting problems with Acidmist continued, and the search for yet another new host had begun. The hosting service of acidmist had cut off all contact from Zelda Dungeon, and this made any fix with the hosting impossible. Unfortunately this also meant that the zeldadungeon.com domain name was also in serious jeopardy. After a search for various other websites that offered free hosting services, Zelda Dungeon discovered a website known as Telefragged. The website was a well established gaming website that hosted several large fan websites from all over the gaming spectrum. They offered free hosting in exchange for a simple banner advertisement that had to be placed on the website. Mases jumped at this over and after weeks of uncertainty with acidmist, the website moved to Telefragged and was now located at zd.telefragged.com.

With the domain name switch, visitors immediately plummeted. Fortunately enough for Zelda Dungeon, the switch ended up being a great benefit, as for the first time in quite awhile, the website was hosted on a consistent server, and visitors soon reached their peak position during the layout 5.0 era.

The 6th layout of Zelda Dungeon was the first layout that had a quick navigation system for the Zelda games. This was a trend started by popular Zelda websites such as Zelda Elements and Zelda Universe, and during this period, nearly every single large sized Zelda website had a quick navigation menu. The quick menu and the additional images on the side bars led this layout to be by far the most image complex layout to date. The lavender colored layout was also something quite different than any previous Zelda Dungeon layout, and was quite a unique look in color for its time. However, after the always strong initial reaction of the layouts launch, most fans did not have good views of the layout.

During this time period, Zelda Dungeon switched to Cutenews. A news system that allowed users to make edits on the sites index page without having to edit and upload pages through the normal FTP programs. Having a new content management system like this allowed Zelda Dungeon to have staff members that can work independently to post news articles without having to go through one of the Webmasters or upload through FTP. Thus, during this time period, several new staff members would come and go, many acting as news reporters. Unfortunately, none of these staff members ever stuck around for more than just a couple of months.

Zelda Dungeon also saw its first active participation in a forum during this time period. One of the websites closest friends at the time was a website known as Zelda Legacies. They had their own community forum, but it was run by Cartoons, a webmaster of Zelda Dungeon. While not officially a part of Zelda Dungeon, the forums were actively promoted at Zelda Dungeon with links and consistent mentions of the forums. Throughout this time period, the website Zelda Legacies was beginning to dwindle away, and the forums were becoming more and more interlaced with Zelda Dungeon. Unfortunately, Zelda Legacies and its forums, eventually went offline, leaving Zelda Dungeon without its own community forum.

Layout 7.0 - Community Forums
Layout 7.0 was launched on August 23rd, 2004, just four days after the websites third anniversary. This was the first of three layouts that would keep the tradition of launching a layout in celebration of the websites birthday. The layout itself returned Zelda Dungeon to white background that wasn't seen since the websites 3rd layout. The layout was created by Zelda Dungeon's very own Metalmallow, and it was his first attempt at a layout. The color scheme was quite a shift from the previous three layouts, which featured much more colorful looks. The layout did however, receive a mostly positive reaction from fans of the website.

Zelda Dungeon's content areas began making a gradual shift from standard content to full blown walkthroughs during the period just prior to the launch of this layout, as well as through much of this layouts lifespan. The first of these walkthroughs was completed in the summer of 2004 and it was the A Link to the Past site walkthrough. It was the first full game guide at Zelda Dungeon to have a complete walkthrough of the game, complete with both text and sceenshots. This new standard of game guides carried over to the original Legend of Zelda, which was completed in October of 2004. In retrospect, many of these early guides appear to be quite primitive, but at the time of their release, it was top of the line material.

This time period also saw Zelda Dungeon's first attempt at its own community forum, which is now referred to as the 1st generation of forums at the website. The 1st forum at the website was created by Metalmallow and lasted for a very brief time period. Little information is known about the original creation of the Zelda Dungeon forums.

Shortly after the fall of this forums, Cartoons wanted to relaunch the forums once again, and he did so on October 10th of 2004. The forum software used for this second forum was the phpbb software. Phpbb is a very popular free forum software that was used by several Zelda fan websites at the time. The forum software offered a whole listing of possibilities through forum modifications. However, due to the lack of experience with the software from the Zelda Dungeon staff, the forums never did get fully customizable. Activity at the forum did in fact spark immediately upon the launch of the forums, and a steady incline in activity followed for the next several months.