How did Wrestling Clique become what it is today?

Wrestling Clique has undergone many changes over the years to become what we are today. Here is a brief history to get you up to speed. We have taken allot of twists and turns along the way.

April 2005

Monks-Diner.Com is opens. Monks-Diner was initially supposed to be something different than the traditional wrestling forum we had seen 1000 times before. So I and Mr. Cool came up with the whole concept of "Monks". Sadly the Seinfeld gimmick we tried mixed with the entertainment aspect was just a disaster from the immediate start. The site was considered too all off topic with no real direction. The Seinfeld Gimmick was dropped immediately and an overall focus on Celebrity News, Celebrity Gossip, Girls and more. By April of 2006, Monks only had 117 members, 61 of which were actually active. The forum consisted of 2,238 threads and a mere 16,882 posts! Some of the contributing members included:

B-Money, Chewy, Crocker, Dakstang, Dynamite Kid, Erin, Freak, Invictus, Jackies, K Jay, Mikk, Mr. Kennedy, Peppermint Fizz, Rambo, Spyda', The Half Boy, and The Phantom

With the slow start, and misdirection of the forum, Simon hires Felix to start working on the forum installing various modifications and hacks, assisting with a new site design, and various other tasks. During this time, discussion of the hyphen in the Monks-Diner.com domain lead to the purchase of MonksDiner.com (Minus the hyphen).

The same focus on entertainment continued but many old school members were still focusing mainly on wrestling and sports. New members were usually interested in the wrestling aspect of Monks more so than the entertainment aspect. Old school members were still into wrestling, but mainly interested in general discussion, sports and wrestling.

September 2006

Monks Diner is slowly but surely gaining new members and posts. On this date the forum has 303 members, 5,727 posts, and 40,991 threads! Members online at this time included:

Azzurri, B-Money, Beaker,Chewy, Crocker, Dakstang, Danny Diamond, emmathe37th, Erin, Gigglypuff, greatgatsby, Hogan, Invictus, jacko, Jodes, Joe Cool, Kaneshow, Klawz, M. Van Sciver, mikedudelang, Mikk, Necro, PeaceSells, Peppermint Fizz, Rambo, Shining Wizard, Spyda', tha_mizz, The Half Boy, The Phantom, Tom Dogg
October 2006

Monksdiner.com acquires WHforumsonline.com and new staff members come on board. Chaos ensues. After the fire is put out a it's nice and overall good turnout. Wrestling is even more of a focus at this time. The entertainment aspect starting to seem misleading as wrestling and general discussion are clearly the hottest topics.
November 2006

Monksdiner.com obtains the forum from Jimmyvan.com with special thanks to Inogenius. Many Monks Diner members were former members of Jimmyvan.com and gave back thousands of posts back to old time Monks members. After the acquisition, Monks stats skyrocket from the merger. Member count is now 2,571. There are 33,996 post contained in nearly 350,000 discussion threads.

Throughout 2007, much focus is set on growing Monks Diner by promoting the forum, building back links, and performing search engine optimization. One of the difficult issues we are faced with is whether or not to change the name of the forum (domain name) to help rank better in the search engines, and also to brand the site with a name that would be representative to its content. After a lot of discussion, the domain WrestlingClique.com is purchased.

The forums are moved and WrestlingClique.com opens January 8th, 2008. Finally, after all of our efforts, hard work, and struggles, the forum is starting to take form into what we had imagined it to be.

Continued site promotion via link building and word of mouth, along with our search engine optimization efforts causes the member count to increase monthly with upwards of 700+ new registrations a month!

April 2008

The final site design is completed. Stats at this time are:

Threads: 80,910+ Posts: 718,000+ Members: 12,590+ Total of monthly unique visitors: 42,000+ Total of monthly hits: 3,000,000+

Monks Diner and the Clique have always prided themselves on a dedicated, loyal staff and members. For the posting style, quality ALWAYS beats quantity. 5 well thought out posts have always been regarded higher than 500 "LOL's" and "OMG Cena freakin rulz!!". So while we may not have the biggest numbers or 1000 members on at once, what we do have is an established community with members that are like family. Many friendships have been formed, and hey, what’s a wrestling forum without a few enemies!

November 2009

Threads: 100,554+ Posts: 1,075,000+ Members: 12,624 (After a major purge of inactives) Total of monthly unique visitors: 100,000+ Total of monthly hits: 7,735,000+ and 2,000,000 page views a month (approx. 30 pages per visitor!)

New design nearly complete.

UPDATE June 2011

Threads: 119,263+ Posts: 1,415,952+ Members: 16,554 (After a major purge of inactives) Total of monthly unique visitors: 108,500+ Total of monthly hits: 19,692,400+ and 2,473,692 page views a month (approx. 30 pages per visitor!)

Upgraded Wrestlingclique to vBulletin 4 Series.

Feel free to pull up a chair and join us anytime!