Public Commander Keen Forum

This page contains historical information on the Public Commander Keen Forum. For the actual web-site, see the Public Commander Keen Forum (external website).

The Public Commander Keen Forum (PCKF) is currently the most active Keen community, thus it is often referred to as the Community. It is currently hosted by Fleexy in the KeenModding.org domain.

The forum attracts fans of the original Keen games, and provides a place for them to ask questions about secret areas, the Standard Galactic Alphabet and general Keen information. It also offers a gateway to the wealth of fan-games and mods which have accumulated over the years.

Interestingly enough, for a forum discussing a 25 year old series of games, a surprising number of newcomers regularly pass through asking for help to complete some part of the games, having only just discovered them for the first time.

A yearly custom among Keeners, mostly centered to the PCKF, is the celebration of Keen Day (3/14, 14th March). Different projects are often released on that day.

History

The PCKF originated as an InsideTheWeb message board (originally message board 5517 later moving to message board 332957), founded by Geoff Sims. Most discussion was about the original seven Keen games, and anticipation about The Universe Is Toast. Some early level editing for Keen: Vorticons as well as the fan-games of the time were discussed there too. The hub for the message board was Cerebral Cortex 314 (CC314), also founded by Geoff Sims.

About November 1999, InsideTheWeb was abandoned and Commander Keen discussion moved to a temporary home as a subforum of the Jazz Mega Message Board hosted by Jazz2City. Before the move to ezboard, there was also a short-lived Public Keen UBB.

In April 2000, a new permanent home was found and the forum switched to ezboard, which was more robust than InsideTheWeb and allowed for graphic updates and layout changes. The PCKF was founded on 11 April 2000, the move was officially announced on 15 April. Cho'gall has been paying for the Gold Membership since then, keeping the board ad-free.

The original administrators were Cho'gall and Thea Gregory, who was the CC314 owner back then. The moderators were Flaose and Snortimer.

As Keen fan-made games became more prominent, an Unofficial Keen Games section was created. It was originally PimentoCheez's fan-game development forum, but it was later merged into the PCKF.

Shortly after the first edition of ModKeen was released in 2002, the "Other Keen Stuff" sub-forum was flooded with modding questions, and Andrew Durdin decided to create the Keen: Modding forum on his own site.

Between 2002 and 2005, the Keen Awards event was held in the PCKF three times at irregular intervals. Members were honoured for their Keen-related works and other achievements.

In November 2007, the forum switched from its ezboard hosting to phpBB, using Andrew Durdin's hosting space at keenmodding.org, and www.pckf.com site address, provided by Vitamin Zach before for redirecting to the old ezboard-based forum. Initially, the address pckf.keenmodding.org was used for the new board.

In December 2016, the forum migrated from its phpBB 2 to phpBB 3.1, using Fleexy's hosting space at keenmodding.org, and pckf.rigeltechnical.com site address. Since September 2017, the pckf.com domain is used again.

Gallery

Main Page Screenshots

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  13 April 2001

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  3 December 2003

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  24 July 2007

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  4 January 2012

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  1 April 2019

Logos

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  Earliest available logo of the ezboard-based PCKF, part of the graphics scheme designed by Pimento a.k.a. hinkle0 in May 2000.

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  GIF slideshow of six different logos used for Christmas 2002, half of them are animated. The creator of the third logo can be identified as Mrbooleano. Open the file to view the animations.

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  Last logo of the ezboard-based PCKF, made by eK. Introduced with the forum's new layout in October 2003.

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  Animated logo of the phpBB-based PCKF, created by Apocalypse Gohan. It replaced the default phpBB logo in September 2008. Used until the migration to phpBB 3.1 in December 2016.

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  The forum's initialism designed by Roobar replaced the default phpBB logo in January 2018, while the header retained its default colour. The logo was in use until May 2020.

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  Current logo (non-animated) and header. The logo was created by Nisaba and Roobar and superseded the previous logo in May 2020, followed by a new colour scheme and header background.

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  Current animated logo.

Miscellaneous Links

• The PCKF
• Closed ezboard/yuku forum: the place where the forums used to be before November 2007 (now on Tapatalk, which acquired Yuku).
• PCKF Archive: collection of archived PCKF topics from 2000-2005 that were deleted because of the ezboard hack.