This is part of a blog series to document the evolution of this community, year over year.

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The Golden Age

This was a year of extreme growth for the community. What started as a small community (13000) exploded to be the largest Nintendo DSi fan community (41500) in the world. As I've said in previous blogs: I never expected this level of success. (Thank you, everyone!) Originally, the websites were hosted on a shared server environment at FastDomain, but the bandwidth usage needed a migration to the Rackspace Cloud with a dedicated virtual server. This raised the monthly hosting fees from $8.00 to about $120.00.

Those who have been members since 2009 will recall the original appearance of the homepages for the Wii and DSi. They were ugly! February marked the time when the layouts went through an overhaul to reduce lag caused by everything loading on a single page. All the clutter on the homepages was split into separate sections, giving a more mobile app appearance. It took some time for this to be accepted by all members (due to the added page loads to get between areas), but it started to grow on everyone and became the pattern followed by other Nintendo DSi fansites during the year. The original icons were ugly, but they improved with time.

It was difficult to decide on branding for the DSi community. It was originally DS Opera SDK, then DSiPaint, and proposed as DSi Universe. The DSiPaint branding stuck, and a logo finally went in the page header.

If anyone does not remember the HullBreach vs. Skunkman blog battles of childhood embarrassments, be sure to check them out. These were in full force in 2010 and were a favorite of the community.

The Mystical Journey had a fair amount of development at the beginning of the year, with a few mini-games and teasers. The high-point was the multi-player demo in April. Unfortunately, plagiarism by some of the development team's artwork caused progress to collapse for the remainder of the year, because much of what had been done required a complete reboot.

Many features saw their births this year, including homepage alerts, the bulletin boards, chatroom bots, DSiPaint Spriter beta, most of the DSi games, groups, the help desk, the DSi library demo, Saviis, and Web hosting. Each major feature had its own launch party in the chatrooms, which frequently had 70 or more members!

During 2010, many friendships were made, and this second generation of members (measured by years) hold nostalgia for the tightly-knit community of this "Golden Age". At this time, it was frequent for owners of each Nintendo DSi fansite to jump between each other's creations and share ideas with other owners. DSiHub, DSiPlaza, DSiTabs, and all the others, were part of a giant and maturing online community. Although some websites have faded, many friendships between these extended communities still exist today.

Toward the end of the year, the release of the Nintendo 3DS was approaching, and preparations were underway...