About Planet Doom

Timeline:

1998 - Planet Doom started as a SF/F/H book review site on Homestead.

1999 - Focus changes towards, SF/F/H traffic and website promotion. Small, remotely hosted directory started.

2000 - Planet Doom Directory relaunched hosted on Searchking. The site exists on both Homestead and the directory on SK.

2001 - Entire site moved to Searchking. Forums Started. Becomes "Planet Doom Portal."

2002 - Searchking gets in legal battle with Google - gets delisted. Searchking moves servers causing disruption of services. Forums moved to Shadowdark.org, renamed Unified Scifi Forums and shared by several SF/F/H websites and directories.

Oct. 2002 - Due to problems with both Searchking and Google due to their dispute, Scifimatter.com is established as a SF/F directory just to be safe.

2003 - Another server move by SK and more scripts on the portal get damaged. Fewer get repaired than were damaged.

2004 - Handwriting is on the wall. The SF/F portions of the Planet Doom database, over 1600 links, are added to Scifimatter.com.

Nov. 2004 - Another SK server move. PD directory is now so broken that it cannot be updated. Repairs are never made by SK. FTP access no longer works so even the static pages no longer can be updated.

Nov. 2004 - Oct. 2005 Despite being delisted in Google due to the SK vs. Google dispute, despite not being updated, traffic from users persists to Planet Doom. People like it.

Nov. 1, 2005 - SK pulls the plug on all portals. Planet Doom Portal (finally) dies.

Nov. 20, 2005 - A new Planet Doom is reconstituted as a search engine on Shadowdark.org with a completely new and fresh database. The decision is made to keep the new Planet Doom in the horror, dark fantasy and monster genres so as to have a unique focus and theme, but also to not duplicate Scifimatter, although there will be some overlap. A real search engine script is chosen partly as an experiment. Black is abandoned as a background color - I'm claiming that it is to reflect the new century - I'm sticking with that story.

Nov. 28, 2005 - Planet Doom Horror Search Engine Launches. In launching Planet Doom on Shadowdark, it turns Shadowdark.org into a proper portal. It also, reunites Planet Doom with with Unified Scifi Forums, which started out their life as "Planet Doom Forums".


That is probably far more than you wanted to know but I did want you to know that we have a history. I was very proud of what I built at the old Planet Doom Portal, and I wanted the name to survive in some way and for it to have something to do with search.

I hope you will enjoy using it and everything else here on Shadowdark.org.

Best,
Brad