March 8th, 2009The end of Mauritius Interactive?
All good things come to an end.
That’s what the Mauritius Interactive(also known as MI) creator and main administrator Joey wrote on the main MI page. I’m not sure when he closed down the website but I heard about it last month. Apart from that sentence and his email address, there’s nothing at the Mauritius Interactive website now. 
(Mauritius Interactive’s url changed a few times over the years but the most recent one that I know of is http://www.miweb.mu )
This means that it’s the end of Mauritius Interactive. It must have been really a very hard decision for the webmaster to take. After all, MI has existed for almost ten years. Users were able to sign up for membership as from year 2000 but at that time, there were few features available on the website. The main feature at that time was the forums. The personal pages or blogs were implemented around March-April 2001 and the webmaster started keeping track of the date of registration of the members as from Sept 2001. The commenting system was implemented in early December 2001. (information obtained from the creator of Mauritius Interactive himself. See: here.)
I think that I got interested in blogging because of MI. It was fun writing about whatever I had been up to, ranting about things which got me upset,posting photos and it was also nice to have people visit and leave their comments.
(Click on the photos to see a bigger version of the photos.)
They are some screen captures that I made out of the old saved pages. I was looking around in my old external hard disk and those those saved pages and even some old IRC chat logs dating back to 2002. Unfortunately, I haven’t found saved pages of the entries written before 2003. 
I’ll try to find more saved pages or screen captures and I’ll upload them there.)
Something I liked was the option to set the blogs to public or private view. I opted for private view because I liked to be able to see which registered member of MI had visited my page. (There was a Visitors page.) Some people opted for public view and non-members of MI could visit their pages. At that time and all the way up to 2005/early 2006, logging in on the Mauritius Interactive website was something that I did everyday. I enjoyed updating my blog and reading other members’ blogs. I made many new friends on the Mauritius Interactive website and even got to know them in real life. There was even a MI party organized a few years back at a night club. (I think it was at Arena.) It has been so long now. I’m not sure about the exact year. I think that it was in late 2003. That also was fun. 
Being a member of the Mauritius Interactive community was on the overall a good experience. However, some people created a few problems on purpose, ’stealing’ photos of some of the female members of MI ,writing mean things about them and posting the photos in a newly created blog there, hiding behind nicknames, leaving no clue about their real identities. Fortunately, the website administrators listened to the complaints, deleted those ‘fake’ accounts and even went so far as to implementing ‘Private pages’ on MI. I won’t go into the details about this but my main point is, the webmaster and the administrators of MI really did a lot of work on the website and they listened to the members’ suggestions and helped to solve the problems. However, despite all their hard work, a lot of people were really annoyed by the increasing number of persons who registered on MI with the main purpose of spying on others. Their own accounts were ‘empty’ and there was no information about themselves in their member pages. I hated that.
I stopped updating on MI one or two years after I left Mauritius to go to study in Shanghai. That’s mainly because I finally had a place to call my own, i.e, my personal website and blog. A friend gave me two domain names in early 2004 and even provided web space. I was overjoyed and concentrated more on updating my personal blog. However I was still going on Mauritius Interactive to see other people’s updated blogs. Then the Mauritius were hit by the sudden Facebook craze. Everyone I know got an account on facebook and less and less people were still updating on MI. Last year when I checked the Mauritius Interactive website, it seemed more or less dead. There were almost no updates. Now, Mauritius Interactive has officially reached its end this year. I can’t help feeling a bit sad. After all, there were a lot of memories there, the blogs, the comments and the emails. I wish that the administrator had given us some notice before closing down the website. I’m sure that like me, many of the members would have liked to save their own blog entries, comments and emails somehow. For me, my time at Mauritius Interactive was a record of a few years of my life. Now I feel like I’ve lost that record of those years.
I guess that now it’s finally time to say goodbye and let go of yet another part of my life.
(I have added information about Mauritius Interactive in my page Blogging before getting my own domain. I feel a bit silly saying this but I’ll really miss MI. )
I’ve joined a few online communities/forums during the past few years, for example the protag board, RBJ and dododsmb. However, they have all become inactive by now. I guess that’s why I’m not joining any other communities/forums now.
Feel free to tag me. I might just do it. 
My friend only noticed that the cat was missing after the movie was over. She found the cat in the bushes, all bloody. The cat is now better but still at the vet’s. Hopefully, everything will be alright.
I’m so glad that I went home.
