Yahoo! Role-Playing
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Role-Playing in Yahoo! came about in many different ways with many different players and goals. Back in 1997, there were clusters of gamers who gathered around Yahoo! Clubs which offered a free message board, chatroom, and member list that promoted play by email games as well as play by chat games (even if they weren't called that at the time). Over time, Yahoo expanded and in late 1997 had chatrooms for all users to mingle within and in the different sections the players frequented they made their own rules. The first of these many groups was named simply "Kelindils Site" which was run by a core group of players and placed Yahoo roleplaying on a path that it could not turn off it. Thereafter, roleplaying in this manner was referred to as "text-based". In time, Kelindil's site lost momentum and its management was taken over by another member of its "staff". (see "Ayenee.Org" below).
During the Kelindil era, the need for a name for the realm emerged. One regular player under the forum name "Aglaranna_" suggested the phonetic abbreviation of A & E, so the word "Ayenee" was born. Two or three years thereafter, Ayenee as a community was split into two separate predominant paths, one being "Ayenee.org," handled by those to whom the original handlers of the Kelindil site had entrusted. The other was "Ayenee.Com," a splinter site that was larger but less governed.
Many other realms spawned, and by 2006 the tensions between the management of Ayenee.com and Ayenee.org had begun to fade. However, other realms did exists in other areas of Yahoo chatting. For instance, in Teen was Tenaria, in A&E (now E&A) they had Ayenee, in Games was Eden, and so on and on. Adult catagories had it's own roleplaying relm, located in the Adult/Role Playing category. Mostly catering to the over 18 crowd, the majority of these plots involved Gor, BDSM and Fringe groups such as Furries. As such, most roleplayers shunned this category.
Some realms never made the progress expected and other realms would take their place with over a thousand members at their peak. Sometimes, there were several realms that occupied the same areas but with different rules. For example in Science there was both Ecniecs and Mordor. In Games there was Hell and Eden. Ultimately however with Yahoo's decision in the early 2000s (2004 to be exact) to stop user-created rooms, Yahoo roleplaying faded from view and took its place on webforums. This change, while harmful to the Yahoo chat roleplaying community and the "unruled" Ayenee, helped the organized Ayenee sites because it allowed players to take refuge once more in another place- especially one they were familiar with.
Role-players were never limited to any one single realm however, and a player could have a few characters in each of the realms, or they could even have characters travel from one realm to another (similar to Knights traveling from one kingdom/realm to another). However, whatever realm they were in, the rules/guidelines were the ones which took precedence, and in Ayenee the Order of the High Knights of Ayenee enforced these. Before this, the Justicars of the Ayenee boards determined rule infractions. In Eden, the Eden Guardians.
By the year 2006, almost all Yahoo chatroom roleplaying has faded except for in Japanese Anime, Role Playing Games, and some lingering in Tenaria. With the constant revisions of its already unstable Messenger "chapplet", and their lackadaisical approach to handling bots, spammers, and online harassment, the environment Yahoo provides has been endlessly criticised by both those who still use it and those who used to.
