Why am I so adamant about keeping the name Wisedocks? I've written in-depth about how Wisedocks is basically shadow-banned in some search engines—cough Google. So why not just dump it and start fresh? A new site would allow me to get some real exposure. So, what’s in a name?
I came up with Wisedocks over twenty years ago, back when I was building websites on Geocities. With my last name being Wiseman, I’d always use a play on it. There was Wiseass Jokes and a few others I can’t remember off the top of my head. Back then, knowing HTML was a big deal since MySpace was the go-to social site, and HTML skills meant you could really make your profile stand out.
I started slowly learning HTML and found that I loved it. I went from using Geocities’ page builder to coding my pages myself. Eventually, I wanted my own domain—a dot-com of my own. I first thought of "Subgenius," a name my best friend and I had made up for a hypothetical band. But my friend looked it up and, surprise, it was the name of a church. So, I had to come up with something unique, something memorable and one word.
My friend and I spitballed on Yahoo Messenger: Wisedicks, Wisecocks, Wiseass, Wiseazz. They were either taken or sounded like porn sites. That’s when Wisedocks hit me. I didn’t love it, but it had "Wise" in it and wasn’t taken, so I made a Geocities page for it, posting jokes and funny pics. Once I was comfortable coding, I bought Wisedocks.com. I got overwhelmed setting up a real domain, but soon stumbled upon PHPBB forum software—open source and free.
I slowly learned to install it, found the AcidTechRed theme, and loved it. My best friend came aboard and helped promote and add content. He was the face of Wisedocks while I worked on the back end. We kept Wisedocks going strong for several years as a forum. I even figured out how to post admin-only entries to the homepage, and my friend would write music reviews and interview musicians.
Meanwhile, I was building out everything I thought was cool: photo galleries, live chat, arcades, a custom currency called Wisebux, and more. At one point, it was practically its own social media site. Eventually, I started looking to monetize. After multiple tries, I got AdSense on the site and dove into SEO.
At this point, though, Wisedocks was all over the place. Music reviews, ghost stories, an arcade, even some fetish posts from other admins. Our Google rankings tanked. I kept saying we needed a niche. I didn’t care what it was, but we had to focus. My friend and I disagreed—he loved the site as it was, but watching our exposure in search engines drop was painful for me.
We compromised on focusing on ghost stories, but I think he wasn’t happy with that. I noticed he was taking down tons of content. At first, I thought he was helping, but it became clear he was just upset. I ended up banning him, which sucked. We’d been friends for so long, and he’d put a lot into the site too. It felt like a breakup. He then joined a competitors site and they tried to hack Wisedocks. That was the end of the first version of Wisedocks. Valuable lesson learned: don’t work with friends.
A few years later, another friend convinced me to go in as a silent partner in a café. I didn’t want to, but he talked me into it. The promise of extra cash for no work sounded great. Long story short, after a few months, he quit, handing me the keys. Since I’d put up most of the money, I couldn’t let it go, so I quit my job and took over. I wasn’t a cook, so I focused on the entertainment side, scaling down to finger foods and hosting pool tournaments.
People loved it. I had regulars coming from all over for the tournaments. I repurposed Wisedocks.com as a business page for the café, posting stats from the tournaments. If you played, you got your name on the website. People loved working on their win/loss records and seeing their names in the stats. This brought more exposure for the café, which I eventually sold back to my friend—who flipped it a few months later.
Wisedocks went dormant for years. In 2016, I bought the domain again with the intent to resurrect it but quickly lost interest. A wholesaler bought it, and I couldn’t get it back for a reasonable price. I should’ve kept it.
I checked periodically, and in late 2022, I saw it was available again. I snatched it up, though I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. So, here we are—still figuring it out.
So even though the ending wasn't that great. Wisedocks the name still reminds me of the good times I had with my best friend while building the site out. Wisedocks has been in my vocabulary for two decades now and it's part of who I am. I've thought about asking him if he wanted to go in this together for old times sake but I have to be honest with myself. I change my mind more than a two year old still just as I did then. There would have to be some stability for this to work with more than one person and I don't have it in me to play nice with others.
I’d want to change the site up completely every two days, which would lead to another fight. I hate that about myself, but I still love my friend, John, like a brother.
Somewhere along the way, I must have lost the files from the earlier versions of the website. When I bought the domain again in 2016, I planned to bring it back to where it was at its height, and I thought I still had backups of the files and database. I searched all my computers high and low but couldn’t find them anywhere. I thought it would be a blast to bring it back as a subdomain, just for nostalgia, but I’ve since accepted that the files must have been deleted at some point.
Even on the Wayback Machine, the CSS and images are gone—just a few fragments of text from old interviews on the homepage. The rest is lost to time. I’ve been tempted to install phpBB 3 and start a forum again; they were such a blast back then. The larger sites that replaced them, like social media and Reddit, just don’t have the same sense of community that bulletin boards did. It’s a shame the major forum software platforms couldn’t adapt to mobile devices. That was their downfall. A simpler interface, the ability to subscribe to certain threads, and having those subscriptions form a personalized feed on the homepage could have made all the difference.
