Merry Christmas

[Lakie]

TO everyone that has made NHQ what it is, our staff, members, visitors etc - current and former, thanks on behalf of Scott, Steve, Matt, KillerBee and myself. We wish you all the best for the season and hope it brings you whatever you wanted (and some communication from NL would be nice too).

Novahq.net History
Before the days of the HQ, Scott (aka Panther) and Steve (aka StevieB) both ran websites for the NL games that did nothing but maps, (Panthers Den and UK Delta Force, respectively). These sites wernt very popular and largely unknown thought the developing NL community. Not being content with the small slice of the pie Scott started chatting with Steve about merging their two sites, with the aim of creating a huge site that exceeded the old Pancho and Heavy site. Although neither of them knew much about what they were doing or getting themselves into, they decided to put their minds to it and give it a go.

The result of this meeting of the minds was Delta Force Head Quarters, who came up with the name has been lost in history, however at the time it signified what they wanted the site to represent, a true one stop fan site. The original domain, df-hq.com, was registered on 4th August 2001 . It took about a month to get the sites merged and up on the new DFHQ and on the 9th of September 2001 DFHQ was launched. DFHQ was launched with a staff crew consisting of Panther, StevieB, Die_4_Me and ½dead with BLADE=GH= added shortly after. DFHQ opened with over 700 maps!
A bit of a rush hit the site when it first opened, however things quickly turned sour, map submissions slowed down dramatically, forums weren’t very active and participation was declining, the site was dying. Not content with that Panther and StevieB overhauled the site with a new cleaner design. It worked, map submissions started coming in, the forums became more and more active and the site started regularly hitting 150 hits a day, which was a goal of P and SB.

Shortly after a very sad day hit the DF community, the original DFBarracks, run by Camo, shut down. This proved to be DFHQ’s big break as Camo redirected his visitors to DFHQ which launched the site once and for all. Its no exaggeration to say that DFHQ became what it was largely in part to that single act of selflessness that Camo did by redirecting his visitors to DFHQ when he closed the Barracks. If your reading this, thanks mate 
DFHQ started to boom after this, map submissions increased dramatically, the forums boomed, the number of visitors boomed, what was once a dream in the minds of 2 small map sites started coming true. Not to say it wasn’t hard work, this boom meant DFHQ became a literl full time job for the staff at the time.

Then the first major problem hit, the place where the domain was registered decided to stuff us around, as a result of this the site was forced to change its name from df-hq.com to dfhq.net (incidentally NovaHQ recommends against dealing with NameZero, and highly recommends Godaddy). Along with the new domain name came another new layout and DFHQ continued to grow.
With the continual growth of DFHQ, Panther and Steve decided to hire some more staff. This is when Trilogy (Matt) and myself (Mike/Blackbelt) came on board. The four of us are still at the site today.

Map submissions were coming in by the hundreds, at the time the HQ was still operating a manual system for maps, enter Challenger, Challenger is a PHP programmer who came to the aid of DFHQ and coded a Map Database, while not feature packed it made map submissions much quicker and smoother. As the maps piled up Challenger again coded us another MapDB aswell as out first gen Sig Hosting script! If your reading this Challenger, thanks!

At some point around here (sorry, don’t have an exact date) we hired Killerbee to be a forum supermod and help out with tourneys . With the exception of a short stint KillberBee has been a staff member continuously, even during his two tours with the US Military when he was in the middle of nowhere as part of his job he still came to NHQ and posted. KillerBee is now a full admin of NHQ and is a great help and more personally a great mate to us all.
Throughout this time DFHQ features were added too and improved. Panther was starting to become fluent in PHP scripting and was able to edit the freely available scripts we used for many of out site features.

Invariably with success comes problems, and DFHQ’s came with hosts, we’ve actually lost track of how many hosts DFHQ has used over the years, however its well in excess of a dozen. It seems no host was able to host DFHQ properly. That was until Panther was referred to rackshack where the site got its very own server. It was expensive at the time however it provided DFHQ with the room to grow and expand, in retrospect it was one of the best decisions ever made.
With the release of the Joint Ops franchise by NovaLogic the name DFHQ didn’t really fit the site anymore. That’s why DFHQ ceased to exist in June of 2004 and was replaced by NovaHQ. The DFHQ ->NovaHQ switch was more than just a name change, it was a complete overhaul, the release of this site was significant in that it was completely custom coded for NHQ by P, everything was done to suit NovaHQ. It was at this time when we introduced the ability for users to switch site and forum skins as well. The MapDB became much more user interactive, Utilities got a massive overhaul,. In short the site went from a hodgepodge of different scripts and a manual system to a single site wide system. At this time NovaHQ had about 6500 members., 4500 maps for download and that year we hit 100 million hits.

[Stephen]

Hope everyone has a good holidays and a happy new year.

[Hellfighter]

Originally posted by Killerbee
Hope everyone has a good holidays and a happy new year.

same here

[Scott]

Merry Christmas!!

[ShArP]

kinda late but Merry Christmas, and everyone have a HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

[Ice Cannon]

a glorius history.

new look site is sweet too

[bigsmellyfart]

happy hollidays everyone

[Xx_jet_xX]

I quite enjoyed reading that and it made me remember hunting up the old .com URL and finaly finding the .net one in a yahoo search, and i remember the announcemeant for the name change, considering i have in my favorites the old domain.

yeah i keep forgetting to delete it as well as other old defunct sites. Its been a long road, and hopefully it keeps going!

Happy holidays and hope everyone has a good 2008!