JohnMcMahon

Hi, my name's John McMahon and I'll be your host here on Voices From Beyond.

I was born, raised and am currently eeking out a living in Dublin, Ireland. I'm predisposed to music that doesn't involve beeping of any kind and am fond of the alcoholic beverage known as Smithwicks.

That's me on the far left, with forum folks Ade, Matt and James. Standing beside Ade and behind Matt is Mike Carey. The chunk of perspex on the table is the Diamond National Comic Award for Best Supporting Character which was bestowed upon Chas Chandler in May 2004.

Normally, I'm not that flushed looking, but drink had been taken - I'm sure you understand.

I've sorted yourself, Chris, Krix and Lou out with custom titles Rogan.

If I miss somebody, let me know folks.

Abhimanyu, when I start delegating it'll probably be to someone who's in a different timezone to me so they can work my nightshift.

There are numerous advantages to this new forum.

First, it's hosted off the main site on a more powerful server. Outside of performance improvements, it means that we should be online 24/7 and unaffected by surges in traffic from movie related shenanigans.

It's cheaper. The old forum is hosted directly on the site through a MySQL server that I'm running. This isn't cheap...or particularly efficient. The old forum couldn't have more than 15 concurrent users online at any one time - you'll notice that the high watermark is 17 over there, this actually took down the MySQL server! Plus, technically I was limited to 50 megs of server space, currently that forum stands at 64.41MB in size, so was only a matter of time before the hammer fell. Here, we have unlimited space.

Moderation is a dream. I have a hell of a lot more controls here and it's a lot easier to set-up other users with moderation powers - something that'll probably happen before the end of the year if this place ends up being as popular as the last. Plus, I have full technical support - I had a query yesterday that was sorted within 10 minutes.

Users have more controls. You can block sig files, avatars and posts from other users. The Ignore function is something that I've had queries about from numerous users on the old forum. It's also possible for me to allow members to set their own custom title, which you can now do once you hit 1001 posts.

With all that said, I'm as fond of the old gaff as you guys and you've really no idea how proud I am of that archive of old posts. I remember when I was running a pseudo forum on the very first version of the Hellblazer site by soliciting e-mails from people on various subjects and posting them online!

Seriously, you should've seen the stupid grin all over my face when I was sitting in The Ship last year with James, Ade, Hugh and Mike - I still can't believe that an off the cuff decision to fuck around with HTML seven years ago has led to me meeting (in the flesh, and virtually) so many great fucking people.

Anyway, welcome to the new place.

Yeah, the fact that certain functions work straight off will be lost on the vast majority or users.

Still, I'm chuffed that the first forum member I met in the flesh is the first person to check in here.

"He's getting married in the morning,

Ding-Dong the bells are going to chime"