Juvenall Wilson

Officially, I’ve been with YaBB since 2001. Since then, I’ve managed to help hundreds and hundreds of people personally. Most of them have issues with their YaBB, adding a mod, installations, etc. Others sometimes ask me for help beyond the scope of YaBB such as design issues, marketing tips or finding a good server. Now, that’s never been apart of my duties for the project, but I tend to do it simply because I enjoy helping others. Aside from a little loyalty to YaBB, I’ve never asked anything in return, however, that’s not stopped a few people from drooping a few things my way. Some people like to drop a few bucks into my PayPal account, two people have bought me books on programming, two bought me gift cards to Amazon.com and one got me a DVD of Red Dwarf episodes. None of it solicited or expected, but all welcome. I was really content with the way things were setup and I couldn’t ask for anything more. At least, that’s what I thought until today.

Back when I started, one of my first support users was in big trouble. His YaBB crashed on him after he tried to install a mod himself and his very active and growing community was stopped cold for over a day. He was afraid that he would loose his entire userbase. So he posted on the YaBB support forums but didn’t get a reply for a good day. That’s when he contacted me (mostly because he saw I was online). He explained the problem and I told him I’d take a look. When I got in via FTP, it was a mess. Parts of the files were missing that needed to be there, he had deleted his entire members directory trying to “reboot YaBB” (as he put it) and had a few other issues in his Settings.pl file that needed to be addressed. I think I spent a good two days cleaning it all up for him and contacting his host to get a backup tarball so I could restore his members.

Man was this guy grateful. So much in fact, he was the first person to send me a few bucks ($10 actually..lol) to my PayPal account. I tried to tell him he would be better off giving the money directly to the project, but as he said “the project didn’t help me, you did”. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch and I’ve watched his site grow and have helped him with many, many issues in that “beyond YaBB” category. I even helped him move his site off of YaBB when his host banned it and other Perl scripts from running.

Well, as you may notice from the archives here at Juvenall.com, my 6 year anniversary with my girlfriend was last month. One thing I did manage to lament over with a few people was the lack of pictures from the event. Normally, I’m a little shutter bug and love taking pics whenever I can. However, my camera is simply too big to lug around most of the time. It takes great shots, but you can’t really put it anywhere without looking like a tourist. Not exactly the image you want for a date. So anyhow, a few days later in one of our normal conversations, I explained this to my support friend above after he asked about the missing pics. To be frank with it, he sounded rather annoyed at first then laughed and said “I have an idea” and then logged off. That was the last I heard from him. That is, until today around 9:30am when I get a knock on my door from FedEX with a small brown box. I sign for the thing, take it inside and open it up. What do I find? A Casio Exilim EX-Z57!

Needless to say, I’m both humbled and grateful by this amazing level of generosity from someone I consider a good friend. This really has been the highlight of my entire day.