Pokémon Fan Universe
Pokémon Fan Universe is a fan site owned by Shining Arcanine. It was started on November 13, 1999. It was and remains run by Shining Arcanine alone.
History
Pokémon Fan Universe was first hosted on Homestead, where it had little content and didn't have much popularity.
After a 18-month period of inactivity due to exhaustion, Shining Arcanine eventually met individuals such as Meowth346 and Pojo staff members who gave him advice. One particular Pojo staff member wrote a Digimon site, showing him what hard work can do over a summer while Meowth346 showed him how to code webpages in HTML and CSS.
In October 2002, Pokémon Fan Universe was published on AlwaysWebHosting, having been completely recoded by hand. The Pokédex was still being coded by hand in HTML at the time. Meowth346 suggested implementing the Pokédex in PHP to Shining Arcanine and helped him do so.
Faced with rising bandwidth cost, Pokémon Fan Universe moved to The Forum Host, which offered free web hosting in exchange for a text advertisement. The host went under a few months later and was taken over.
In December 2003, Pokémon Fan Universe was moved to 1&1, who were offering free 3-year hosting packages. Unfortunately, 1&1's servers were insufficient to serve Pokémon Fan Universe's visitors so in January 2004 Pokémon Fan Universe switched to a web host that was created for the sole purpose of giving away cheap webhosting. It later evolved into A Small Orange Software, and continues to provide Pokémon Fan Universe with a reliable and inexpensive hosting as of 2005.
Controversy
In mid September 2008, the only active admin of Pokémon Fan Universe's forums, Jax Malcolm, stepped down after almost five years of work on the boards. In the process, she closed down the board under the condition that it would be reopened if Shining Arcanine would choose a new, active staff. However, after two days of being offline, Shining Arcanine, who largely ignored Jax's requests, returned for the first time in months to simply reopen the boards with no further action. Angered by this lack of response, Jax returned to strip herself of power and publicly announce her resignation.
A week later, the higher staff departed with her, resulting in the locking of forums by the only active super moderator El Niño, who wished to repeat Jax Malcolm's attempts to close down the board for similar reasons, as well as the mass locking of topics by moderator Ekibyōgami. This resulted in a massive flame war which has continued to this day.