Madville.com's Life Story For those of you who haven't been around since the start, you most likely have no idea about all the changes, and events Madville.com has gone through. Keep reading and you'll find out.


Madville.com, formally NewsGeek.net, was born on the boring night of May 22, 2001. NewsGeek.net ran on the PHPNuke backend, and provided its users with quick daily summary of the tech news that went on that day. The site was in operation for about 2 months before it was struck in the back, and had its heart ripped out by SurLink.net, our former hosting provider. To make a long story short, they decided to disappear one night, leaving all their customers hanging with no idea where they were, or when, or if they were coming back. They packed up all the servers, and walked into the night without a trace. NewsGeek, its files, its database, and 3 months of prepaid dedicated server hosting went with them.

Closed for over a month, NewsGeek still had no home, nor had any intentions of coming back online, until another boring night when the site came back online thanks to the folks at InsideCrew.net. We reinstalled PHPNuke, and started our site over from scratch.

Given the second chance, NewsGeek became a hit. In only two months, more and more users made NewsGeek part of their daily surfing. As the user base began to grow, it was time to hop off the PHPNuke backend, and into something a lot more comfortable - our very own backend. It launched on January 3, 2002.

As time went on, the site's focus changed quite a bit. More of the news we posted wasn't directly tech related, but just interesting and weird finds on the internet. Of course this doesn't have anything to do with the brand 'NewsGeek,' so we felt it was time to change the name into something more fun and exciting - Madville. NewsGeek.net will eventually turn into a fully 100% tech related site sometime in the future.

Work on Madville began as version 2.0 of our backend. Adding tons of new features, including theme support, journals, chat, Madville Lite, an aimbot, and a few others, the site seemed to be almost perfect. Dozens upon dozens of bugs from the previous version were also fixed, leading to the eventual path of completion.