A BRIEF HISTORY OF THISISBIGBROTHER.COM

ThisisBigBrother.com was founded after Big Brother 2 finished screening in the UK

A relatively new site compared to some of the others, we have grown rapidly since then and are currently one of the most popular UK Reality TV websites in the UK traffic wise. We have a very active forum which has over 12,000 members, a figure that is growing daily. We like to think we are one of the friendliest Big Brother sites on the web.

I'm Mark and I am the Webmaster of the site. When I first started the site it was just a few WebPages, but ThisisBigBrother.com started to prove so popular that I soon decided to add a forum. Rick joined me on a temporary basis and helped develop and setup the forum, and once his work was done, he moved on to other projects.

After Rick moved on I looked for a new management team to help me run the forum. "LEE" joined me as a Forum Administrator and "Wildchild" took on the role of Moderator. Fairly soon after we added "Kaz" to the team making a third Administrator. All of the team worked very hard at running the forum and I am extremely grateful for them for the time and effort they put in.

As the site grew we began to have problems with our original hosts so decided to look around for a new deal. Through the XMB site (XMB is the software we use for the forum) I met Richard who runs a hosting company called Aventure Media and we decided to move over to him. Richards company helped us expand the site and we moved over to their US Server known as AventureDNS which gave us enough space for future expansion.

For some time, the main site was offline for redevelopment and we ran with just the forum. Even without a main site we became one of the busiest Big Brother forums on the web.

We were mentioned by Channel4 on the official Big Brother Website as "the second best" Big Brother site around. We were really happy about this at the time, and it gave us a lot of new members.  The site which was awarded first is no longer around, so we now unofficially claim the title!

Shortly after, WebUser Magazine featured us. They mentioned ThisisBigBrother.com saying it was a "good site, with an active forum" and gave us 3/5. We were really pleased with this, as when TiBB started we never thought it would be as popular at it has been and we've been lucky to receive so much attention.

During the time between BB3 and BB4 we focused on the forum, and tried to make it more popular. We succeeded, and made around 10,000+ posts during this time.

While Big Brother 4 was running, we decided to make some changes to the way ThisisBigBrother.com was run. James joined me in helping to run the main site, as well as becoming an Administrator on the forum and gallery. Amy joined the team as a forum moderator, and helped to update the news on the main page. 

Big Brother 5 was a another success, with the site growing in content and new members joining every day.

In the time between Big Brother 5 and 6, we had a lot of hosting problems. After some downtime, and chasing up loose ends, we moved to our new host LMHosting. They offered us a good deal at a competitive rate.

Big Brother 6 and 7 were far busier years for us, to the point where the site was so busy on some days that we crashed our server.

After Big Brother 8 finished, we reorganised the management team of the forum. There were 12 of us running the forum, and I'd like to thank them all for their hard work and long hours they put into keeping TiBB the success it is.

Big Brother 9 was the point at which we decided to expand out and focus on other Reality TV programs, not just Big Brother.

This year for Celebrity Big Brother, and Big Brother 10 we are hoping to smash all records and make the site more popular than ever.

To read about the people behind TiBB, click here