Admittedly, this post comes a bit belated—between all that I've been busy with of late, and having not checked in a while and mis-remembered the approximate times of the anniversaries—but I didn't want this to go unobserved.

It was on October 11 ten years ago when the Internet Animation Database was announced on the Golden Age Cartoons Forums. Little more than a couple of weeks later, the GAC Forums would be officially shuttered and our friend and webmaster Eutychus established this forum as an unofficial successor where the displaced community could continue. (Though it would soon become official in a way, when a link was added to the main GAC site for its final years of existence.)

I hope I'm not alone in expressing some appreciation for all that Patrick has done over the years, and continues to do, to a large degree single-handedly in keeping an independent, traditional discussion forum for animation online, creating and administering the Database itself to provide a superior alternative to other such sites, and preserving the GAC legacy (without him stepping in when Jon Cooke was finally ready to pull the plug, the GAC Forums archive would have been lost to the ages, and the GAC-hosted websites would have only been preserved by the Wayback Machine and no longer been visible resources in Internet searches).

Much has changed in those ten years, and not much of it for the better, with many having "moved on" to "social" media platforms as their primary means of animation-related interaction—because being spied on and manipulated by big corporations for profit, and having older discussions not be nearly as easily accessible or searchable as on a traditional forum, is what's fashionable these days. But fortunately for those of us who dissent from this, thanks to Patrick, this forum continues to provide an alternative, and years worth of informative and entertaining cartoon discussion from the past remain a resource.

Here's to another ten years!

Has it been ten years already? I have GOT to get out more!

But seriously, thank you for your kind words. It's been a trip. There are some times that it's been a struggle. There have been times where, had I known how big a project this would turn out to be, I definitely would have had second thoughts about taking on such a massive project. But here we are ... almost 65,000 entries, over 26000 artists and 6200 videos listed. And more being listed every day.

There is still so much that I want to do with the site. It's a little difficult these days trying to find a balance between working on the mechanics of the site and working on the content. I still have a ton of art gallery items that I want to get posted; drafts, storyboards, model sheets ... you name it. We have enough screenshots in the queue right now to last us well into next year (and the contributions show no sign of stopping!) And the archiving project is up to about 8 terabytes of cartoon content at this point with at least that much waiting in the wings to be indexed.

One thing that does concern me as time goes on is the longevity of the site. I had always envisioned the site to become more than just a fan site. But I just turned 66 years old and although I don't plan on going anywhere anytime soon, it's nags in the back of my mind that I should be looking around for someone to take over after I get old and silly. (any takers?) One of the things I'm working on behind the scenes is adding comments to the programming so if anyone were to take over, another ASPX programmer would be able to easily see what is going on in case they had to fix things.

Lastly, I can't take complete credit for all of this. It has been the contributions in both time and information from our gang of researchers that have made this site what it is. So if this site has managed a modicum of success, it's not just because of me, but because of your hard work and dedication and for that I think you from the bottom of my heart.