Radagast, one of the most prominent members and one of the best administrators and staff members this site has seen. To understand “his” history we have to go back all the way to 2005. In February of that year, a new forum member by the name of ‘Radagast’ joined the site.

Radagast immediately stood out as a very mature member. His posts rarely had spelling or grammar mistakes, and he was never afraid to start a new discussion regarding LoTR related topics. Due to his activity in the Lord of the Rings books section, he became known as the “Lord of the Rings lore master” after some time.

Most notably though, he was very involved in many, if not all aspects of the forum community from the start. Whereas many new members are wary of taking up issues with staff, Radagast was never afraid to ask questions regarding staff plans and decisions.

As a very unique move, he was appointed forum moderator just one month after his initial post. As far as I remember, this has ever happened before in the history of this site. To indicate the “era” in which he joined staff, the staff then consisted of the following notable members (I may have missed a few): Tharquan and Tavros as administrators, while JJB, Freek and Tokyoblade were forum moderators at the time. He was not very sure about his decisions as a moderator at first, and asked a lot of advice to the other staff members. As time progressed though, he was usually noted as an exceptional moderator. He was fair in judgement, and always treated members with respect – giving them an explanation if they would ask for it.

In September 2005 he was appointed global moderator. Forum affairs continued as normal during that time, with no particular events requiring our attention. Then, a few months later, in April 2006 – Radagast was appointed forum administrator. This brought the site – for the first time – to a 3-tiered Administration, with Tavros, Freek and Radagast being admins.

After Freek resigned a few weeks later, and Tavros became less active, Radagast enacted many many changes to the forum. Most notably is the Realms feature, which was immensely popular for a time. Sadly though, this feature died within a few months, and was finally removed during the administration of Pacers7isback. Most of the features introduced under Radagasts’ administration have since disappeared. This is largely to blame to the general decline of the site over several months. As a fact though, the overall forum activity got a big peak under Radagast, which is a unique achievement due to the fact that all the other peaks were achieved during upcoming game launches.

During his period as Administrator he strove to honour members who contributed to the site. Many members were awarded with special ranks and perks. As activity dwindled though, these ranks also fell into decay since most of the active members had already gained the highest ranks.

However, there is no doubt about it. Radagast has been one of the most successful administrators to date. As it stands now, the period under Radagast has been the most active since the redesign of the site by Besim.

In September 2006 Radagast resigned as an administrator due to having a general lack of time to spend on his administrating duties.

The Order

Radagast soon regreted his resignation as new admin pacers7isback promoted former moderator and leader of Anti-Besim group Apollo. Radagast was against his promotion because Apollo suddenly showed up on the forums and instantly became moderator, skipping the normal trials and because Apollo wanted the site to move away from its gaming coverage.

Radagast then formed The Order of Istari, which consisted of some of the most respected members of the site. Their purpose of the order was to legally remove Apollo and help the progress of the site. Later on Radagast revealed the information of MECs sale, which he had heard about from Tavros during his administration of the site. Radagast and Tavros shared the opinion of preventing the sale and even closing the site if they fail, so the new objective of the order was also to prevent the sale.

The Order then started a petition to remove Apollo. The petition was signed by half of the active community and staff members. Later on, Radagast made a deal with Tavros to prevent further problems between Apollo-supporters and the Order. They had decided to demote Berethor a moderator of 3 or 4 forums of our choosing, and the community, the administrators, and the other moderators would watch him for 4 weeks. After that there would be a poll in which the members would decide the fate of Apollo. Radagast lost, yet he claimed that he was cheated.

The staff found out about the order and got in their forum, discovering that Radagast had leaked sensitive information to non-staff members. Tavros was very disappointed with Radagast, as he trusted the information to him expecting not to reveal it to anyone, so Tavros banned him for a month.

Afterwards, Radagast stopped visiting MEC even after he got unbanned, he thought that he had done all that he could to better MEC. Some time later, Radagast started to post again, but then disappeared due to joining the Norse military along the Russian border for a year.