1. Was it a joint effort if so with who?

H-Palm was started in Summer 2002, May 20th to be exact the first plans where made and the first launch was on the 10th of June if I'm not mistaken.

2. H-Palm Forums start?

(I just gave the entire history)
It was a joint effort. Barros and I used to run an Warez Website called Mapeditor.com (hence my msn addy). We did that entirely for the kicks of getting a lot of visitors. We where planning on creating a huge educational website, based on History and Geography in 2002. We wanted to break our visitor amounts we had on our Warez site with this new website.

Now during that time I also was co-webmaster of HentaiPartyNight.tk, which I joined in December 2001. In fact I only managed the website in the beginning for a 2 weeks, while the orginal owner was on holiday. I didn't get into hentai myself untill March 2002 where I read about hentai in a magazine. I re-joined the HentaiPartynight website and eventually became the owner of it in May 2002. Now knowing that HPN got a lot visitors I also proposed to make a website unlike any other Hentai websites during that time.


2002 Year of Creation

In 2002 there where like tons and tons of small websites with all kinds of content, everyone had a bit but nobody had a big archive. So I figured if we make a huge archive website, people will visit. Hentai Palm was founded in 10th of June 2002. When Ivan a fellow webmaster from the pay website scene offered us free servers to host Hentai Palm on, aslong we linked to him.

This went alright till September 2002, when Ivan had to cut our website off due massive traffic and his server not being able to handle both our website and his. As we got the servers for free and ran a free website we didn't have enough funds to get our own servers. So during October 2002 there was no Hentai Palm. And we orginally fell back to HentaiParynight.tk which during that time had become bigger as well and also more of an archive site (although smaller).

Begin October 2002, we got a lucky break, Rowan of Hentai Key finally Launched Hentai Key to the public, he had been testing it since September 2002 and finally decided it was public worthy. We joined his collective and got a server to host Hentai Palm on. At this time Hentai Palm was still a 100% free site. we returned online again. This time with the free Hentai key as secondary back up. The website re-launched end of October 2002. As a multi level website, both free and free hentaikey. So basically still 100% free.

However in a short time of only a few weeks the visitor amounts grew and grew to more then 8,000 unique visitors a day. Making Hentai Palm the biggest Hentai Key site during that time. Because of that, Rowan asked us to integrate Hentai Key Elite on our website begin November 2002. And on the
21st of November Hentai Palm turned to the system it was until last month. A multi level website with 3 different levels , Free, Free Signup and Elite.


2003 Year of Growth

We ran Hentai Palm to a huge size during end of 2002 and begin 2003. End April 2003 we had to change servers. After that we restored the entire site again and on the 1st of May 2003, Hentai Palm was back online on it's new server. This was way faster then the old one and could support more people on the website. This is also the year where Hentai Party Night, merged with Hentai Palm Giving it an even bigger boost of visitors. Hentai Palm grew bigger up till December of 2003. When a new limit was reached Hentai Palm had grown to amazing size for that time. In 2003 Hentai Palm was also the only big Hentai picture archive site around. With only a few others that started to come up as well.

More events then that happened during 2003. 2003 was the year of the famed 5chan. This was the first version of 5chan under the ownership of BarnacleEd a.k.a NekoEd together with Zabadab. This website was becoming huge as well. With the help of hosting of Hentai Palm it survived for quite some time actually. That was until the xchan wars started and NekoEd ran away. [for more information check wikipedia]

2003 was also the year of the most website design changes. With 3 different type of designs. The old 2002 theme, the 2003 theme with Kim Possible and then the upcoming Adult Power Puff Girls and finally the Winter Theme! The winter theme was the longest lasting. It was originally made for the winter, and as a hub to the new upcoming website. The winter theme design however stayed online until June 2004. This seriously caused a lot of visitors going to the verge of insanity, as the snowflakes never seemed to disappear. Some visitors even demanded and others even begged for a design change.

And last but not least, in 2003 the first expansion of Hentai Palm collective was made. As Hentai Palm (because of the expansion we made up Hentai Group) grew with 2 new websites Doujin Domination and Manga Palm. Both website focused on bringing massive amounts of doujinshi and Manga's for free to the public. Especially in the begin DoujinDomination was updated a lot and got a lot of regular visitors. It was so to say a successful expansion.


2004 The Golden Age

The golden age of Hentai Palm, sadly enough that's the simple truth, as 2003 was the year of the most & massive updates. 2004 was the year of ultimate growth, website wars, a major forum activity increase, massive website break downs and huge amount of visitors. It was by far one of the most active years in the history of Hentai Palm & Hentai Group.

During 2004, in the middle of 2004 to be exact, we changed server once again. This time however it caused a failure in the database and for a couple of days the website was inaccessible and we had no way of updating it either. Luckily this only happened for a short while. The server we got in 2004 is the same server we used through out 2005 and begin 2006. So you can say, it served us well…

2004 had website resurrections and new website launches. In Winter 2003 Barros and I had brainstormed over new websites and decided to launch them during 2004. The names of these projects were labeled. Moviepalm, HentaiGroup and HentaiShop. Only 2 of the 3 actually got launched in 2004 but it was still a big upgrade of the existing collective of Hentai sites HentaiGroup managed. Other websites (not originally planned in 2003) joined the HentaiGroup namely Doujin-World and the relaunch of 5chan.

Movie Palm launched in April 2004. And HentaiGroup.com launched in March 2004 however the website wasn't working as it does now until July 2004. When it was reformed and expanded to not just being our Portal website, but we also a Torrent Tracker for Hentai. This lasted throughout 2004 and gained reasonable populairity. Another thing that happened during 2004 was the extreme growth of Hentai Palm forums. Hentai Palm's forum are old, they are as old as Hentai Palm. It was created in 2002, but had never grown to anything big. Through out 2002 it was tiny community with only about 10 to 20 active members. In 2003 this community grew a bit but nothing worth mentioning. But when 2004, the new attachment system started to kick in. People started to post pictures on the forums, which easily accessible to everyone. On top of that, Numbus promoted the Forums more through main website, putting tutorials and F.A.Q's on the forum so people where forced to check it out. 2004 was also the year where the forums grew to such a size we had to get a separate server for the forum itself to maintain. The community grew to several thousands of members with about 100~150 active posters. But more details about that later. Another website that started out in 2004 was my personal weblog, although no big bearing in the whole Hentai Group network, it's still a fun fact.

Perhaps one of the more well known events in 2004 was the website war between E-hentai and Hentai Palm. In 2003 Hentai Palm and E-hentai even had a website relation by sharing link trades, this was when E-hentai was still under control of Grahf. When he was lost in the worlds of MMORPG, the website was taken over by a child that named himself Eva. He found it necessary to pick a fight with the IRC channel operators and founder of #e-hentai and on top of that break off the link trades to Hentai Palm without notifying us in anyway. If that wasn't enough he decided that everyone that owns another Hentai website was not longer welcome in the IRC channel he rarely visited. By banning several people including me, which where in the IRC channel operators & halfops. This was the final drop that did overflowed the bucket of water. The Founder of #ehentai, closed down the site and created Doujin-World. For more detailed information about this war check out http://www.numbus.com and look for entry named: Starting of a Mythical Tale:
Doujin-World as originally created out of spite for e-hentai. But eventually grew out to be its own community. And in July 2004 we officially started Doujin-World Translations. Yet another projected backed by Hentai Group. Slowly we started to publish translated doujinshi and we still do that until this day. With more then 120 Doujinshi Translations on our name and new ones getting added every week, this is yet another good running and big project by Hentai Group. For more information about the creation of Doujin-World and it's history check out http://www.doujin-world.com

To go back to Hentai Palm, in 2004 a new design was made to replace that amazingly annoying winter theme. This design made mid 2004. It almost didn't change in appearance up to the year 2006. This is the longest lasting design since the creation of Hentai Palm. 2004 also made Hentai Palm publish the translated doujinshi by Doujin-world and increase its focus to not only picture galleries but also manga and doujinshi section which grew a lot over time. Mainly because of the growing size of 2 years of Hentai updates, Hentai Palm was huge in terms of content which attracted a lot of visitors and I mean a lot. 2004 ended up not as the highest traffic amounts in a year but most defiantly with the biggest increase of traffic compared to the previous years. While the previous years where good and we still had several million visitors, 2004 boomed that amount of getting more traffic in 1 year then we had in total in 2002/2003. This was to our great delight and we were without doubt amazed about these huge traffic numbers. However these huge traffic amounts brought with it a problem, unforeseen. The old script written in 2002 and updated only slightly over 2003 was hopelessly outdated. The website script wasn't meant to deal with 20,000 visitors a day. So it had to be re-written. Sadly enough this came a horrible time, with the main coder extremely busy with it's studies the fixed came slowly and needed 2 re-tries. The major issues started to happen at the end of 2004, when like in 2003 we broke all our previous the records again.

For those that visited Hentai Palm during those times will remember the following error very well:
“ "Warning: mysql_connect(): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/tmp/mysql.sock' (11) in /home/hpalm/public_html/dynamic/includes/functions.inc.php on line 876
HentaiPalm.com error
An error occured in the connect_db module:
Can not connect to database" ”

It was major Database failure, it simply got overloaded and could only support about 1,000 people at once but there like 2000 people on the site. Meaning every time you tried to load a new page you would kind off enter a lottery where you had 50/50 chance of winning. If you were lucky and during peak hours it even went up to 3000 visitors meaning you chances reduced a lot!

2004 was also the official year 5chan died for good and hasn't returned again since then. The last time it died was due a disagreement between Zabadab and Numbus. Although it might have been the most invalid reason for the site to die, it did anyway.

And finally with the end of 2004, a new website was created and HentaiRO.com was founded. This was an adult Rangarok Online server. This server ran actually for a good 6 months. Originally created by Hentai Group, with people like KazuoDamage and HolloW being head Admins. It was given to Reena who had been by far the most supporting and best GM of the game.

And now we just go along to the year 2005, the year of depression.


2005 Year of Depression

The year of depression, the 3rd year of HentaiGroup. And man this was a crappy year. Not just did everything not go as it supposes to go, almost nothing new got added. Hentai Palm which used to be updated frequently and with big updates started to crumble down. The gaps between updates were sometimes up to 14 days. This had never happened before without any valid reason. Even though in 2005 the major database bug was fixed and the people started to flock back to the website. The reduction of updates and the errors with other websites in the Hentai Group collective started to pile up, it was wasn't a happy sight.

Doujin Domination almost never got updated anymore, even though the whole system for Doujin Domination got re-written. Doujin domination was now the most advanced website in terms of coding backing. It had and still has fully automated importer programs that give anyone using it the possibility to update the site quickly and without too many problems. Yet this didn't increase the amount of updates. Manga Palm was dead in the water up till end of 2005, it hadn't been updated for a good part of a year. Movie Palm was one of the most active websites during 2005 with major updates in the Anime sector. However it lacked in Hentai severely due to the Hentai Movie provider barely updating anymore. The only Hentai Group section that did grow, and grew a LOT during 2005 was Doujin-World, which seemed almost untouched by all the negative things happening that year.

Even though Hentai Group did grow a bit, by support HentaiSha with hosting and accepting new websites like Furrynest, Hentai Euphoria and Masterbloodfer.org into the collective by also is supporting them with hosting and creating Hentai-Chu Hentai Movie Translations. Never the less through out the entire of 2005 too many things happened. Like the removal of the torrent tracker, servers went down, forum wipe, fights between a Doujin-World Translator and the Doujin-World Project leader, website project delays, website projects failed, A lot of forum drama, close down of the RO server and another 2 forum shutdowns. So in overall it wasn't a good year.

The following projects were suppose to be launched in 2005, Hentai Pyramid and Hentai Resource, DoujinDB, Hentai Academy and the official Hentaism website. None of these previously mentioned websites got launched. Only 1 finished so far and 2 of the other 4 are dropped for ever. Second month of the year 2005, had some disturbing news about the MPAA and RIAA hunting down torrent sites. Even though our torrent tracker didn't have any MPAA or RIAA content, we were still forced to remove it as the hosting company we where located banned torrents both tracking and files. This was the first set back. Not long after that, the HentaiRO server shut down due to some coder fucking up the server and deleting everything on it. Only a few weeks later the already unstable forum database crashed deleting the entire forum. Although we were able to re-launch the forum fairly quickly it didn't go as it should. To make matters worse the Hentai Pyramid project got delayed because the original designer and coders for that project ran off with the money and didn't deliver anything. The in the middle of 2005, Numbus got into a fight with one of the Doujin-World translators, named FekketCantenel. At first it started about religious arguments and in the end some rumors about bad translations came up and only made matters worse. It's still unclear or she got fired or quit. Seems that happened on the same day. After the summer a new and perhaps the most shocking event of 2005 happened. 3 of the servers of Hentai Group got shut down, resold and everyone on it deleted. Simply because there was some mix up with 2 hosting companies. With a massive money loss, even law suit following yet no results. With that Hentai Group got one of the biggest blows in its history. Within 1 day the entire Hentai Palm Forums, FurryNest, Masterbloodfer.org, Hentai-Euphoria and all the XDCC Bots were removed and didn't return. Until this day Hentai Group hasn't fully recovered from that event. With sites like Furrynest and Hentai Euphoria still down and Masterbloodfer on a temp server the real core is gone.

It's a good thing that good things still happen. Even though the seemingly negative cloud hanging over the year 2005, there were some very positive things. Doujin-World expanded with a new translation team named Team SaHa. This duo of Translator & Editor started to produce Doujinshi Translations at an extremely high speed. Increasing Doujin-Worlds output. Another project was successfully launched in 2005 named Hentai-Chu. A translation group of Hentai Movies, this worked properly until end of 2005, when some of the Chu bots went down with the previously mentioned server shutdowns.

Hentai Palm on its own did grow in terms of visitor amounts; again a record was broken in 2005, with more then 1 million unique visitors within 30 days. This is without a doubt was cause for celebration. Other smaller and more positive modifications to Hentai Palm in 2005 were the change of the top banner and the official creation of the unique comic serie by Hentai Group named Urbi Sagira. Which was planned to be release at the same time Hentai Pyramid would launch. In 2005 two other things got “invented”, although it doesn't directly mean its under Hentai Group control it is defiantly affiliated. These 2 things are the GHAW (Global Hentai Appreciation Week) and Hentaism (Your official Hentai Religion). Created and thought up in the depths of the Hentai channels on IRC. It is most defiantly some interesting projects. Hentai Group gladly affiliates itself with both of the 2 ideas and the owner of Hentai Group adapted the GHAW to its sites and converted to Hentaism!

2006 Year of Hope

Things started to look good again in 2006. Hentai Palm active picked up again, some of the old problems were fixed. New servers were provided and slowly we got MoviePalm a bit back on track. And finally Hentai Pyramid got launched in January 2006. Giving everyone that as a GT site a new Movie and Game site to enjoy.

All seemed well until March 2006, when the whole lolicon affair started. This is still in progress. Hentai Palm had to close down for 21 days, mainly because of this matter (31st of March till the 20th of April). Now most of Hentai Group has been moved outside the jurisdiction of the US Government and doesn't have to hold it's self to the stupid US Government laws from now and in the future.

What lies ahead in 2006? Nobody knows.


3. With what websites Hentai Palm was affiliated over time?

From the very beginning we have been affiliated with or still am affiliated with
Hentai Sha
WWOEC
Masterbloodfer
Hentai Movie Base
FM Hentai
Ankh Works
Studio AIP
Hentai Key
FurryNest
5chan
Dusk Studios
Hentai Euphoria
Hentai Addict

And in the very beginning Hentai Quest Forums, not that it was anything official but most of the people that are in power now at Hentai Group are from old Hentai Quest Forum.