About
We've been working on the web since 1996.
MagnetiCat is an independent community infrastructure studio. We look after forums and online communities, and the systems underneath them.
We started building websites in 1996, under other names. MagnetiCat itself dates from 2001, and its first project was our own: a PlayStation 2 site, Ps2Fantasy, which by 2003 was one of the larger PS2 communities online. It stopped being updated in 2004. The site itself now lives at psfantasy.com. It is still up (opens in a new tab), and so is its forum (opens in a new tab).
So we ran a community before we looked after anyone else's. That is why we think about a forum in terms of its members and its archive rather than as a database with a theme on top.
Client work followed, mostly around vBulletin. Over that period we shipped more than 300 custom products for the vBulletin framework, and looked after communities including SportsCardForum, DiyMobileAudio and PowWows. Most of that software is long retired, along with the platform generation it was written for, but it is where the habit of reading somebody else's undocumented code came from.
More than two decades later, much of our work involves the kind of systems that only become understandable through experience: applications that have grown organically, changed hands repeatedly, survived several generations of technology and still matter to the businesses running them.
Not everything needs rebuilding. Everything needs to be kept secure and current: patched, backed up, running on versions that still receive fixes, and watched by somebody who would notice if that stopped being true.
How we work
We are independent and we stay small on purpose. The person who answers your email is the person who will be working on your system, and they will still be the same person in three years. For the kind of work we do — where the value is in remembering why something was built the way it was — that continuity is the product.
It also means we say no to work that does not fit, and we would rather tell you that early than discover it halfway through.
The work is not only maintenance. Recovering WhiteBlaze meant writing reconstruction tooling from scratch; merging the GT40s boards meant custom scripts to reconcile databases that disagreed with each other. We write PHP, Python and shell for these jobs, and we will build a new system when a client needs one, though that is not what we lead with.
What we have been doing lately
Recovering two communities after a root-level compromise. Merging forum databases that earlier disasters had split apart. Carrying one client's boards from vBulletin 3 through to Discourse. Keeping several long-running communities online, in two cases since 2010.
Have something difficult?
Tell us what you are dealing with. You do not need to know exactly what is wrong before getting in touch.