Please come in and have a drink of tea with us while we tell you all about how The Rumbles got started! Well, it all started on a blizzardy day in December... LOL not quite *grin* The idea for The Rumbles formed in my head (Mystical Grrl) after I had left The Site Fights with a bunch of other people due to disagreements on the way that The Site Fights was run. I was going to join The Web Brawls, as all of the people that I had left with were joining this competition. However, when I went to go visit, I found that the Web Brawls was being built exactly like The Site Fights so I decided not too. I pondered on this for another month or so, and then decided that if I didn't agree with the other comps around, I would build my own! *smiles* And that is just what I did... the idea came to me in November, 1998 and I, along with a few others that decided to join me, worked really hard to build our website competition. We were only the third competition in existence at the time, and we wanted The Rumbles to be different - so we made our competition completely No Vote Exchange, and also allowed competitors the choice of how many competitions they wanted to be in. I had thought that the Web Brawls was the first to include this rule, but apparently I am wrong, so The Rumbles was first :) The Rumbles officially started competition January 4, 1999.
The Rumbles was so different in their approach to web competitions, that we grew very, VERY quickly. In a matter of about six months, we had 24 teams and over 700 competitors. It was hard work keeping everything in order, and eventually things came crashing down a little. I found out that a few of the people that were volunteering with The Rumbles had decided to form their own competition, and they were attempting to get all of our volunteers and rumblers to go with them. The people who left also made up horrible rumors about me (that weren't true) and as the two other competitions had hated The Rumbles (in fact, a few of the people from both The Site Fights and the Web Brawls would come over here and harrass us, spamming our guestbooks and emails, etc.) they grabbed the rumors and ran with them - and many competitors and people really believed them as the truth! It was a very hurtful time for me, as not only did I lose people I had considered my online family, but I also had a lot of false rumors going on about me. These people started up a competition called 'The Digital Delilahs' (no longer in existence) and told me that they didn't believe The Rumbles would last for their first year anniversary. I have to admit that before they said that, I was pretty much so downtrodden that I was ready to quit, but that made me angry, and spurred me on to make The Rumbles even bigger and better!!
Most family members and rumblers stuck by The Rumbles, which was so great *smiles* and with the help of the people who were loyal to The Rumbles, we kept The Rumbles going, and kept adding to it so that the Rumbles stayed just as popular as it was - we were even thinking about adding 6 more teams we had so many competitors!! However, at this time I had started university, and I found that I couldn't run both The Rumbles AND do my university work. You can imagine with about 800 sites at this point how much work was involved in keeping The Rumbles going!! So I passed over management of The Rumbles to Lady Peace. I'm afraid that I can't remember how long she ran it for, though I do remember that when she left, she passed the management on to Lady Linx. In May of 2001, Lady Linx wrote to me to say that she was in hospital and wouldn't be able to continue running The Rumbles, and so I took The Rumbles back over.
Although I had been certain to insist that The Rumbles stayed with my fundamental beliefs, i.e. that each competitor could join as many comps as he/she wished, and that our competition would be NVE, both Lady Peace and Lady Linx ran the competition very differently than I did. By the time that I got it back in 2001, the competition had been run into the ground. We had about 250 sites competing, but most were not active, and nobody seemed to really take charge of the competition. I had two assistant managers pass onto me from Lady Linx's time, and although I tried my hardest to be sympathetic with the way that things had been run while they were asst. managers, I also knew that The Rumbles needed to change back into the upbeat place that it had been before. I made a lot of changes to the competition, and both of the assistant managers decided that they would leave and start their own competition.
This would have been okay with me, except for the fact that they stole a lot of our pages, our graphics, and while they still had the passwords, they went in and deleted pages and put up huge banners about how horrible I (Mystical Grrl) was. They also spammed guestbooks of rumblers telling them that I was dreadful, and that they should join THEIR competition and not remain at The Rumbles. It was very hurtful, though I hadn't been as close to them as I had been to the people who formed the Digital Delilahs, so at least it didn't come from people who I thought were my friends. At this point most people at The Rumbles were happy to see these two people leave, though a few rumblers and family members left with them. They formed the 'Golden Elite' competition, which is still in existence today.
The Rumbles shut down for two weeks, and regrouped. We asked everyone who wanted to continue competing to please rejoin as we weren't sure how many of the people competing really wanted to compete. We ended up with 50 signups out of the 250 people that had been competing. So essentially it was like starting all over again for us. So that's what we did :) The Rumbles continued going pretty well, getting better and better all the time, until I tried to move to the USA in 2001, and had a lot of difficulty getting online. Eventually I had to shut down The Rumbles because I just couldn't get online. When I came back to the UK in October, 2001 I started up The Rumbles again, but in February of 2002 I ended up shutting it down again.
At this point I was going through a very difficult time in my life. I had my daughter Chloe in January, 2002 and there were several things going on at once. I was having trouble with my husband, my daughter was being investigated because she wasn't doing the right things at the right age (leading to her diagnosis of Ring22, a rare chromosome disorder) and I also had post-natal depression. It wasn't a very good time at all, and there was no way for me to have run The Rumbles effectively at this point. I know it looks and sounds bad, but I would rather have The Rumbles shut down than have it run at sub-standard levels. Hopefully you can all understand that :)
Finally in the fall of 2003, I restarted up The Rumbles, and quite soon after that, I had the idea of having both VE and NVE sides to each team. This way each member could truly decide whether they wanted to vote exchange or not and not have to worry about being able to join the team that they liked. To explain cause this sounds kind of confusing, before this time we had 8 teams on the VE side, and 8 teams on the NVE side - all different teams. So if someone wanted to join a specific team, like the Mystical Creatures, then they would have to be on the NVE side - when they might want to VE. Does that make sense? Anyway, it worked out wonderfully, and we were the first competition to ever do this - though now quite a few are following along this way :)
In the early months of 2005, one of The Rumbles most devoted and wonderful staff members decided to make her own competition. Unlike the two people that I spoke about before, she was absolutely wonderful about everything. She didn't steal anything, or spread any rumors at all - she didn't try to take anyone with her. She even changed her opening competition date for me because it was originally on my birthday. Because of the way she acted, I'm happy to plug her competition here, it is the Web Town Competition. Please do check it out, and good luck with your new comp again, Diana!! :)
The Rumbles was shut down again at the end of April, 2005 so that I could focus on finishing my degree and getting good grades, and because of other circumstances in my life, The Rumbles stayed shut for the entire summer. We finally re-opened again in September, 2005, and it was great! Just like family coming home again :)
The Rumbles was going smoothly until January, 2006 when I (Mystical Grrl) decided that I needed more time to spend with my family. I know this is like 'again'? LOL But really its a struggle with my son and daughter - sometimes things will go along great, and then wham! Chloe will go into hospital, or something will happen, and I'll struggle even more to get everything done. I essentially decided that it was time for me to shut down The Rumbles for good, never to be opened again.
However, I felt so badly about leaving my family and friends here, so I tried to find a way to keep The Rumbles going in my own little way.
I started speaking to Sirkissa's Magick Karnival, another comp, and someone there suggested a merger between The Rumbles and SMK. This didn't go through in the end because most rumblers and family members were completely loyal to The Rumbles (Yay!) but during the time that we were thinking about, I was concerned about the NVE sites here at The Rumbles. SMK is strictly VE, so the NVE sites would have nowhere to go. So I asked Angelstorm, one of my assistant managers, if she would like to run a smaller, condensed version of our NVE side with only a few teams. She immediately jumped to the challenge, and is in the process right now of getting that ready to go for February, 2006!
The Rumbles then ran smoothly from March, 2006 when it re-opened to October, 2006 when Angelstorm decided to step down as the manager for personal reasons. I, Mystical Grrl, felt I was up to the challenge once again of running The Rumbles having had a number of months away, so I decided to take over and continue with The Rumbles :) We shut down for a few weeks to change the competition back to having both VE and NVE, and started up again in November, 2006. We are now up and running and going strong!!
During December, 2006 a wonderful rumbler named Patty came to me with the idea of having a team that catered for those holiday pages that people make for Halloween/Christmas/Easter, etc. The way that our comp is set up, we can't just open one team, we'd have to open up two, so we decided to open another team in addition, which is called 'The Sundaes'. It will be really neat to watch them start up in January and see how they do. *smiles*
Things were going pretty well to begin with. I then had a son in January of 2007 and my life went haywire - which meant less time for The Rumbles, unfortunately! We managed to keep the comp going until summer time when we shut down for three months. It was a nice summer, though we all missed our rumbles family! Later in the year when we started up again, things were still difficult, but we managed to get by.
After Christmas we were meant to open up again in January of 2008. Unfortunately my life was just too busy, and I had to let everyone know that this just wasn't going to work out anymore. It was a very sad time as we shut down all of the teams and a lot of the groups and things. In April of 2008 we will be opening up a 'mini comp' for The Rumbles, and that will be the only competition in The Rumbles from then on. So hopefully things will go well, and we will be able to keep our wonderful Rumbles family together, albeit on a smaller scale!
The Rumbles is the best comp anyone could ever find, and I feel so lucky and so grateful to be a part of this wonderful comp! Thank you so much to everyone who makes this all possible!! and may The Rumbles last forever!
