There was a time where the TI community was thought to be dying. Texas Instrument came with a calculator with no programming capabilities, MaxCoderz was slowly getting abandonned, Cemetech hosting went haywire, TI-Freakware's fellow 68K coders were leaving one after another, Ticalc.org was lucky to see one program feature in a month, UTI, while active, had no more releases, then finally Omnimaga died. People thought F-Zero, Project M, Doors CS 7, Axe, Escheron and Nspire ASM were impossible dreams. At one point, there were rumors that in 2007, ticalc ran their last POTY ever and that the site would eventually end the same way Dimension-TI (Calc.org) and TI-Files did, several years ago. It even seemed like it did not matter what you contributed to the TI community anymore. The greats of today were barely coding anymore. It was mass chaos.

The problems that went on in the TI community eventually calmed down, allowing Omnimaga to restart. Omnimaga was originally not supposed to re-open in 2008, but many requests pushed me and Netham45 to at least allow it a fresh restart. At this time, the sole goal of the site was to attempt at offering a TI discussion area in the same fashion as back in the days, with promising releases over the years. There were no hopes of getting the activity we had during the first part of 2006. In fact, the site re-opening was never announced anywhere. The only clue people got was by trying the URL in their browser, following old links on other sites or when Ticalc.org announced the 2009 contest. At this point, we were not expecting a lot of months above 1000 posts, except maybe during Winter time. The only goal was to offer a different TI forum with different goals once again and keep the TI community somewhat alive. A small core group of users from the old board were our main contributors.

Then came F-Zero, TI-Boy SE and 8 level grayscale. Things that were told to be impossible years ago were finally done. OS keys were then factored, followed by many other discoveries. September 2009 became the month with the largest amount of ticalc.org features in 5 years. It seemed like at this point, the TI community was about to see a revival, something unexpected in the previous year. Although the TI community has seen a lot of changes since the end of 2008, the revival seems to have happened. If it didn't, then it is probably close. Today, even if we remove features of old programs that were missed before, 2010 already got more features than 2009 on ticalc.org.

Then there's Omnimaga, a site that seemed like the black sheep of the TI community back in the days, that managed to revive. A fresh and slow restart. It was clear that we would never see days with 200 posts again, something that was already extremly rare back in the days, and that our summers with 50 posts a day that we once thought to be inactive would look like active times. So then the first year passed, our board slowly approaching 12000 posts and it was common to see about 15-20 different registered users logging in in one day. This was an entire year on the new Omnimaga forums.

Who would have thought, that the year after that, two years after we thought the TI community was dying, that Omnimaga would have higher activity than anything ever seen on other TI-83/84 forums? Who expected to open Omnimaga on August 25th 2010, exactly two years after its resurrection, and find it with 57500 posts (more than what the old board and the temporary board combined had in 2.5 years in an era where the TI community had yet to go through its lull)? Who would have thought that the #omnimaga IRC channel, where it was rare to see more than 20 users connected at once, would sometimes have as many users as #TCPA back in the MaxCoderz glory days?

With the dedication of several of our forum members, staff and their contributions to the TI community, the extremly rare 200+ posts days seen in 2006 became something common, the impossible 300+ post days finally happened and after being rare for a while, they became something common as well, then finally it even became typical to have one or two days with over 400 posts here and there, even if less than two years earlier, it sometimes took close to an entire month to get 400 posts. Even the days in the early 200s started to look inactive. It then became common to see the online list wraps in two lines of text on most screen resolutions and 3 on standard ones. 20 logins a day became 80 and Summers that were once the quietest period in the TI community managed to break records even with several people away.

So this is how Omnimaga came along, since its unexpected resurrection exactly two year ago. Here is how the activity evolved on the forums in its 730 days of existence.

I would like to thank to everybody who have contributed in helping this site grow in the past 2 years and to the people, especially Necro, who bugged me non-stop during all of August 2008 to restart a new site from scratch. In the next days, there will be more site updates, including new staff additions (it will be possible to continue applying afterward), a new admin, Omnimaga 9th anniversary (Omnimaga having started long before having a website) and the eventual opening of our new downloads section.

Omnimaga is an inspiring tale, and it just goes to show, look what we have accomplished?  Surely nothing is out of our grasp

I agree with what Builderboy said about nothing being out of our grasp.

Also I didn't knew you were in the community for that long Bwang :O. I was sure you joined like 2 years ago.

That said, I haven't posted on DS in 5 years. My nickname there is Kévin9999

Aaah ok I see. ALso wow I just found your DS account http://www.detachedsolutions.com/forum/sp/1301/

I remember this board was never really active like UTI/MC/Omni/Cemetech but it had a lot of useful info. I remember that long thread about TI wanting to disallow 3rd party OS programming in 2002.

This is a tale of inspiration.  It shows that all it takes is a dream of a few to enrich the lives of many.  Thank you DJ, for creating this site.

i remember back in 2007, when i was busy typing away at crappy basic and my friend told me about something he'd heard of called omnimaga. he said it had been a group of basic elite(or something to that effect) and then showed me a copy of metroid(it's funny, thinking back. i had no clue what xLib was and thought the whole thing had been somehow made in pure basic ).

Hmmm...Maxcoderz seems possible, seeing it is not completely dead yet.
I really wish we could bring DS back, though, despite the unlikeliness of success. DS is a legendary place, the home of great software like MirageOS, PuzzPack, and Omnicalc. It's sad to see it fall into disuse

Nice summary! This site has definitely grown a lot!