Wetpixel.com Design History

A timeline of Wetpixel’s design, platform, and infrastructure changes from 2000 to the present, documented through primary source articles, forum threads, and Wayback Machine screenshots. Browse the full archive at web.archive.org/web/*/wetpixel.com.

Wetpixel’s technical evolution mirrors its editorial arc: rapid innovation under co-founder Eric Cheng (2000—2012), a major visual overhaul under Adam Hanlon (2013), incremental maintenance (2014—2022), and eventual abandonment (2023—present). The site passed through at least four distinct CMS platforms, five forum software packages, and three hosting providers over its 23-year active lifespan.

Design Eras

Era 0: Breitigam’s single-page news service (2000—2001)

David Breitigam launched Wetpixel on March 21, 2000 as a dedicated news page for underwater digital still photography. There was no equivalent resource online — Steve’s Digicams was a popular digital camera news site but had no underwater-specific coverage. Breitigam created Wetpixel to fill that gap, using Steve’s Digicams forums for the message board component (where he served as the underwater subject moderator). The site used a black background with yellow and white text, the dive flag logo, and the tagline “The Digital Photography Resource for SCUBA Divers.” It was part of the Underwater Photography WebRing. There was no forum, no CMS — just a hand-maintained web page with news items, a gallery, links, reviews, and a message board link (first Coolboard, then Steve’s Digicams forums from March 2001). Copyright notice: “(C) 1999, 2000 By Wetpixel and David Breitigam.”

Wetpixel.com in 2001 — Breitigam's original single-page news service

Era 1: PostNuke + XMB/phpBB/Invision (2002—2003)

After Eric Cheng took over in late 2001, Wetpixel was rebuilt as a full community site. The design featured a dark blue header with the iconic diver silhouette logo and “WETPIXEL.COM — digital photography for divers” branding. A navigation bar provided access to News, Reviews, Features, Galleries, Forums, Links, Contact, and About sections. The layout used two columns, with articles on the left and Photo of the Day plus updates on the right.

The forum software went through three packages in quick succession. The first self-hosted forum used XMB, which had significant bugs: post editing and quoting were broken, email notifications were unreliable, and member locations displayed incorrectly ([1]). By October 2002, Cheng migrated through phpBB to Invision Power Board (IPB), performing a two-pass data migration (XMB to phpBB to Invision). Avatar images were lost in the process ([2]). James Wiseman was appointed the first forum moderator in October 2002, already responsible for over 20% of all forum posts (1,000+ at the time) ([3]).

The CMS was PostNuke, an open-source PHP content management system. Article URLs from this era reveal the PostNuke module system: wetpixel.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=PNphpBB2&file=index ([4]). The forum server was hosted on eLinuxServers (URLs reference corvette.elinuxservers.com).

By October 2002, the forums had grown to 844 topics, 4,555 posts, and 484 registered members. Image uploads were limited to 50 KB per file ([5]).

Wetpixel.com in 2002 — Eric Cheng's community site with diver logo

Era 2: Version 3.0 — Ground-up redesign (January 2004)

On January 23, 2004, Cheng, James Wiseman, and Craig Jones launched what Cheng called a “ground-up redesign and rewrite” ([6]). The visual design used yellow-green highlight bars and a multi-column layout with sidebars for partners, sponsors, navigation, and login. The forum remained on Invision Power Board but was freshly integrated with the new CMS.

New features included unified login across the site, a web links directory where members could submit their own links, and a FAQ section. Cheng emphasized that the rewrite made it easy to add new features, allowing the site “to grow without limitation” ([7]).

The migration was fraught with issues. A dedicated migration thread collected 122 bug reports ([8]). Problems included: members needing to re-upload avatars (limited to 8 KB, 64x64 pixels), PostNuke and IPB using different signature systems (HTML vs. BBCode), broken links in migrated content, and slower page loads — a typical forum page was ~80 KB of HTML compared to ~60 KB on the old forum. Dial-up users noticed a “sluggish” experience; Cheng acknowledged the HTML was ~30% larger and promised a lightweight skin option. Craig Jones worked through February migrating all feature articles from the old design ([9]).

By March 2004, the site reached its 2,000th registered member (ReeferBen, who won an Ikelite PCm Lite as a prize). Forums contained over 31,500 messages. The 1,000-member mark had been reached less than a year earlier, on May 7, 2003 ([10]).

By May 2004, the site had outgrown its server. Cheng warned of intermittent downtime while migrating to a different server ([11]).

Wetpixel.com v3.0 in 2004 — multi-column layout with sidebars

Era 3: Exhibition Engine redesign (February 2005)

On February 26, 2005, Cheng launched another major redesign, calling it a transformation from “a basic news listing site into the premier online resource for underwater digital photography” ([12]). The visual design shifted to a clean white background with a streamlined two-column layout. The right sidebar displayed the Photo of the Week (POTW), community forums summary, sponsor logos, and archive navigation.

The CMS moved to Exhibition Engine, an “advanced, multi-blog engine” created by Alex King. The forum software was upgraded to Invision Power Board 2.0, with custom single-sign-on integration built by Alex King to bridge Exhibition Engine and IPB 2.0. The site moved to a dedicated dual-processor server for performance. Key contributors to the redesign were Cheng, Alex King, Markus Nolf, and James Wiseman. In March 2005, Cheng noted that Alex King had published a summary of the coding efforts documenting the SSO integration and content migration ([13]).

New features included:

The migration thread collected 67 replies documenting issues ([15]). Community response was generally positive — “Very clean, and somewhat more logical navigation” (derway), “nice new shiney interface” (timing) — but users missed the “last 5 posts” widget on the front page and the “mark all forums read” feature. A significant issue: old forum attachments were broken by the migration. Cheng put them online at /migration/oldforumimages/ (split into “old” and “really old” subdirectories) so users could find their images. Avatar images were also lost, again. Some forum posts intermittently disappeared and had to be reposted ([16]). Old BBCode formatting required manual re-saving to render properly.

Classified ads moved back into the forums. The login flow was awkward: logging in and out happened in the forum area, and users had to click the Wetpixel logo to return to the main site.

Growth milestones during this era:

June 20, 2005: A DDoS attack against another client of Wetpixel’s hosting provider caused ~4 hours of downtime. “Nearly killed me,” wrote forum member anthp ([19]).

Wetpixel.com in 2005 — Exhibition Engine redesign with clean white layout

Era 4: DoS attack and server migration (January 2008)

On January 24, 2008, Wetpixel was the target of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that took the site offline intermittently overnight. Matt Segal reported the outage and confirmed the hosting provider had identified it as a targeted attack ([20]).

Five days later, on January 29, 2008, Cheng announced that Wetpixel had moved to a new server, with plans to optimize for speed in the coming weeks ([21]).

Era 5: Software upgrade and “Wetpixel Online” branding (July 2008)

On July 26, 2008, Cheng and Cor Bosman completed a major upgrade of all server software, working together for two days (Cheng posted a photo of them coding side by side). The visual design was refined with “WETPIXEL ONLINE” branding, a top navigation bar (Articles, Magazine, Forums, Media, Travel, Contests, Resources, Help/About), and a right sidebar with the POTW Contest, Print Magazine links, Google Search, sponsor logos, and article archives ([22]).

New features from the upgrade:

The feedback thread collected 55 replies ([25]). Drew Wong noticed the PM button was gone (replaced by a dropdown on the username). Steve Williams reported the Article dropdown and member map were broken in IE 7. The custom front page/forum integration required migrating old custom code into new plugin architecture. Community reception was positive: Stephen Frink quipped about the photo of Cheng and Bosman: “I always suspected someone was drinking the Kool-Aid at wetpixel” ([26]).

April 2009: Cheng swapped out part of the server infrastructure for a much faster setup. The speed improvement was “particularly dramatic for those outside of the United States.” Team Wetpixel members, who browsed ad-free, saw no change since “that is where most of the slowdown came from” — confirming that ad serving was the primary performance bottleneck ([27]).

Wetpixel.com in 2008 — Wetpixel Online branding with refined layout

Era 6: Security breach and forum maintenance (July 2012)

On July 3, 2012, Cheng took the entire site down after discovering that parts of Wetpixel had been compromised by the Blackhole Exploit Kit. For several days, sections of the site had been redirecting users to malicious pages. Cheng reported that no passwords or user information appeared to have been taken, and Mac users and those with updated browsers were safe. The front page was restored first, with forums following later. Chrome and Safari displayed malware warnings until Google re-indexed the site. During the outage, community activity shifted to the Wetpixel Facebook group ([28]).

When the site came back, Steve Douglas noted: “The new GUI looks good” — suggesting some visual refresh accompanied the security remediation ([29]).

Era 7: Major redesign with “Full Frame” feature (February 2013)

In February 2013, under Adam Hanlon’s editorship, Wetpixel underwent its most significant visual redesign since 2005. The CMS was moved to ExpressionEngine (distinct from the previous Exhibition Engine). The design introduced a light blue header, card-based article layout, and a sponsor sidebar. Cheng was still involved technically — he was active in the feedback thread fixing bugs, including Flickr embed issues and category navigation ([30]).

Key new features:

The feedback thread (35 replies) revealed mixed reception ([32]). The most common complaint was excessive white space on wide monitors. User cneal noted “a lot of white space left and right” on a 1600x1200 screen. Cheng defended the fixed-width design, citing readability research: “It has been proven that people read more effectively in columns.” Howard suggested dropdown navigation menus for article categories with tagging support. Flickr URL auto-embedding caused black boxes in signatures — Cheng had to disable Flickr video embedding to fix it.

Note: Only posts #26—36 of this thread survive in the archive. The first 25 posts, likely containing initial reactions to the redesign, were lost during the forum crawl.

Era 8: Tapatalk crisis and server migration (2019)

In January 2019, Tapatalk hooks broke and were disabled, cutting off mobile forum access for users who relied on the app. Interceptor121 first reported the issue; forum member thetrickster suggested implementing premium subscriptions (like Scubaboard) to fund the site. Hanlon initially promised to fix the issue but later admitted: “Tapatalk and this version of the forum software are not compatible and when I enable Tapatalk, it breaks other links and functionality in the forum.” He floated rewriting the site “from the ground up” as the real solution, calling it “a big job” — then, after “several hours of frustration,” announced he had fixed it ([33]).

In July 2019, a more significant server migration and forum update was performed by Tom St. George, a web developer and underwater photographer who was also a Wetpixel contributor. The migration thread (69 replies) documented numerous issues: reply buttons missing, signatures gone, profiles showing 0% completion, country flags broken, “recent topics” navigation removed, and Tapatalk broken again. Tom St. George worked through bug reports methodically, re-enabling features and fixing issues in real time ([34]).

Community reaction to the 2019 refresh was surprisingly positive despite the bugs. TimG called the layout “very clean looking” and praised the auto-updating stream. Chris Kippax agreed: “definitely more 21st century. Easy on the eyes with nice contrast and clean lines” ([35]).

Separately, interceptor121 later noted that “In 2018 Adam told me he got a contractor to redesign forum and site” — suggesting Tom St. George may have been working on this for over a year before the July 2019 deployment ([36]).

Era 9: Decline and abandonment (2023—present)

The site’s last article was published in April 2023. The visual design remained unchanged from the 2013 era — light blue header, “Full Frame” carousel, card-based article layout, sponsor sidebar — though increasingly showing signs of neglect with broken images and unprocessed membership requests.

August 2023: Forum member interceptor121 raised concerns about preservation, noting the forum was “hosted on invision and there are fees to be paid. The moment those fees are not paid or the subscription lapses this forum is dead.” The moderators confirmed they had no admin access. User “waterpixel” downloaded 294 of 301 Wetpixel YouTube videos (65 GB) as a preservation measure. Cheng was identified as a potential contact for anyone wanting to take over the site, though Hanlon appeared to be the sole owner ([37]).

December 2023: Waterpixels.net launched as a community successor, announced on the Wetpixel forums themselves by Kraken de Mabini. Members began migrating to the new forum ([38]).

April 2024: Moderator TimG reported “There has been no word from Adam… The site continues as, for the moment, no interventions are necessary. Nothing is being updated in the background that we know of.” User barmaglot identified the hosting provider as Arcustech LLC (Rochester, MN) and the domain registrar as Tucows, noting that transferring control would likely require a court order complicated by Hanlon being British while the hosting was American. ChrisRoss noted that new members could no longer join, and the forum was no longer viewable by guests, crawlable by search engines, or archivable by the Wayback Machine ([39]).

April 16, 2024: Wetpixel Ltd (UK company number 11657743) was officially dissolved by Companies House due to lack of required filings. The company had been incorporated on November 3, 2018, with its registered office at 82a James Carter Road, Mildenhall, Suffolk. Its last filed accounts were made up to November 30, 2021. The nature of business was listed as “79120 - Tour operator activities” — reflecting the Wetpixel travel/workshop business rather than the media operation ([40]).

July 2024: Kraken de Mabini compared Wetpixel to the Flying Dutchman — “abandoned, with no editor and no visible owner, yet it survives on the Web.” TimG responded: “At some stage we, the Mods, guess it will die a death as licenses will not have been renewed or necessary payments made… Thankfully most shipmates have airlifted to Waterpixels” ([41]).

September 2024 and beyond: The site continued to function autonomously, powered by its Invision Community installation running on Arcustech servers. Occasional posts still appeared, but the site attracted scammers in the unmoderated Classifieds section. As of 2026, the site remains technically accessible, a ghost ship sailing on autopilot.

Wetpixel.com final state — the 2013 design as it appears today

Platform Stack Summary

EraDatesCMSForum SoftwareKey People
02000—2001Static HTMLNone (Coolboard/Steve’s Digicams)Breitigam
12002—2003PostNukeXMB -> phpBB -> IPBCheng, Wiseman
2Jan 2004PostNukeIPBCheng, Wiseman, Jones
3Feb 2005Exhibition EngineIPB 2.0Cheng, Alex King, Nolf
4Jan 2008Exhibition EngineIPBCheng (server migration)
5Jul 2008Exhibition Engine (upgraded)IPB (upgraded)Cheng, Cor Bosman
6Jul 2012Exhibition EngineIPBCheng (security remediation)
7Feb 2013ExpressionEngineIPB (upgraded, likely 4.x)Hanlon, Cheng
8Jul 2019ExpressionEngineInvision Community (IPS)Hanlon, Tom St. George
92023+Same (abandoned)Same (abandoned)—

Community Growth Timeline

DateMembersPostsTopicsSource
Oct 20024844,555844[42]
May 20031,000——[43]
Mar 20042,00031,500+—[44]
Dec 20043,000——[45]
Feb 20053,000+——[46]
Aug 20054,000~60,000—[47]
Oct 20054,250+—10,000[48]

Infrastructure Incidents

Recurring Migration Pain Points

Across nine eras and at least five major migrations, several problems recurred:

  1. Avatar loss — Avatars were lost in the Oct 2002 migration (XMB to IPB), the Jan 2004 v3.0 relaunch, and the Feb 2005 Exhibition Engine migration. Each time, users had to re-upload.
  2. Forum attachment breakage — Old forum attachments broke in every major migration. In 2005, Cheng put them online at /migration/oldforumimages/ in two directories (old and “really old”).
  3. Signature corruption — Signatures converted between HTML and BBCode formats broke consistently. The 2004 migration mixed PostNuke HTML signatures with IPB BBCode.
  4. Post disappearance — During the Feb 2005 migration, some posts vanished after submission and had to be reposted multiple times (confirmed by both derway and Matt Segal) ([58]).
  5. Login inconsistency — The “Random Logout feature” plagued the pre-2005 site. Exhibition Engine and IPB required a custom SSO bridge to unify authentication.

References

Sources

  1. Forum thread: Whats Busted On The Message Board ↩
  2. Forum thread: Data Migrated From Old Forum ↩
  3. Wetpixel article, Oct 24, 2002: Forum Announcements ↩
  4. Wetpixel article, Oct 31, 2002: Strobe Use For Digital Cameras For Beginners ↩
  5. Wetpixel article, Oct 24, 2002: Forum Announcements ↩
  6. Wetpixel article, Jan 23, 2004: Wetpixel V30 ↩
  7. Wetpixel article, Jan 23, 2004: Wetpixel V30 ↩
  8. Forum thread: Wetpixel Migration Thread Jan 2004 ↩
  9. Wetpixel article, Feb 11, 2004: Features Migrated ↩
  10. Wetpixel article, Mar 28, 2004: Wetpixels 2000th Forum Member ↩
  11. Wetpixel article, May 25, 2004: Wetpixel Server Status Important ↩
  12. Wetpixel article, Feb 26, 2005: New Wetpixel Design ↩
  13. Wetpixel article, Feb 26, 2005: New Wetpixel Design ↩
  14. Wetpixel article, Mar 1, 2005: Wetpixel Potw Contest ↩
  15. Forum thread: Wetpixel Feb 2005 Migration Feedback ↩
  16. Forum thread: Wetpixel Feb 2005 Migration Feedback ↩
  17. Wetpixel article, Aug 13, 2005: Wetpixel Hits 4000 Members ↩
  18. Wetpixel article, Oct 8, 2005: Wetpixels Reaches 10000 ↩
  19. Forum thread: Downtime June 20 2005 ↩
  20. Wetpixel article, Jan 24, 2008: Wetpixel Target Of Dos Attack Back Online ↩
  21. Wetpixel article, Jan 29, 2008: Welcome To The New Server ↩
  22. Wetpixel article, Jul 26, 2008: Wetpixel Server Software Update ↩
  23. Wetpixel article, Jul 26, 2008: Team Wetpixel Gets Low Bandwidth Skin ↩
  24. Wetpixel article, Oct 11, 2008: Wetpixel Gets New Rss Links ↩
  25. Forum thread: Wetpixel Software Upgraded ↩
  26. Wetpixel article, Jul 26, 2008: Wetpixel Server Software Update ↩
  27. Wetpixel article, Apr 29, 2009: Wetpixelcom Speed Increase Today ↩
  28. Wetpixel article, Jul 3, 2012: Wetpixel Forums Are Down For Maintenance ↩
  29. Wetpixel article, Jul 3, 2012: Wetpixel Forums Are Down For Maintenance ↩
  30. Forum thread: Wetpixel Redesign Feedback ↩
  31. Wetpixel article, Jan 3, 2015: Full Frame 2014 Retrospective ↩
  32. Forum thread: Wetpixel Redesign Feedback ↩
  33. Forum thread: Tapatalk Hooks Were Disabled For This Forum ↩
  34. Forum thread: Forum Update Bug Reports Here Please ↩
  35. Forum thread: Forum Update Bug Reports Here Please ↩
  36. Forum thread: Preservation Of Wetpixel ↩
  37. Forum thread: Preservation Of Wetpixel ↩
  38. Forum thread: Waterpixels Is Now Up And Running ↩
  39. Forum thread: What Is The Story Of Wetpixels Survival ↩
  40. Forum thread: What Is The Story Of Wetpixels Survival ↩
  41. Forum thread: Is Wetpixel Like The Flying Dutchman ↩
  42. Forum Announcements (article) ↩
  43. 2000th member article (article) ↩
  44. 2000th member article (article) ↩
  45. 4000 members article (article) ↩
  46. Redesign announcement (article) ↩
  47. 4000 members article (article) ↩
  48. 10000 topics article (article) ↩
  49. Forum thread: Whats Busted On The Message Board ↩
  50. Forum thread: Data Migrated From Old Forum ↩
  51. Wetpixel article, May 25, 2004: Wetpixel Server Status Important ↩
  52. Forum thread: Downtime June 20 2005 ↩
  53. Wetpixel article, Jan 24, 2008: Wetpixel Target Of Dos Attack Back Online ↩
  54. Wetpixel article, Jul 3, 2012: Wetpixel Forums Are Down For Maintenance ↩
  55. Forum thread: Tapatalk Hooks Were Disabled For This Forum ↩
  56. Forum thread: Forum Update Bug Reports Here Please ↩
  57. Forum thread: What Is The Story Of Wetpixels Survival ↩
  58. Forum thread: Wetpixel Feb 2005 Migration Feedback ↩
  59. Wetpixel, v3.0 (article) ↩
  60. Features migrated (article) ↩
  61. Wetpixel’s 2000th Forum Member (article) ↩
  62. Wetpixel Server Status (IMPORTANT) (article) ↩
  63. New Wetpixel Design! (article) ↩
  64. Wetpixel POTW Contest (article) ↩
  65. Wetpixel hits 4000 members (article) ↩
  66. Wetpixel Reaches 10000 (article) ↩
  67. Wetpixel target of DoS attack, back online (article) ↩
  68. Welcome to the new server (article) ↩
  69. Wetpixel server software update (article) ↩
  70. Team Wetpixel gets low-bandwidth skin (article) ↩
  71. Wetpixel gets new RSS links (article) ↩
  72. Wetpixel Embedded Photo of the Week Website Contest (article) ↩
  73. Wetpixel.com speed increase, today! (article) ↩
  74. Wetpixel forums are down for maintenance (article) ↩
  75. Full Frame 2014: Retrospective (article) ↩
  76. Forum Announcements (article) ↩
  77. XMB bug report thread (forum) ↩
  78. Data migrated from old forum (forum) ↩
  79. Migration thread Jan 2004 (forum) ↩
  80. Downtime, June 20 2005 (forum) ↩
  81. Migration thread Feb 2005 (forum) ↩
  82. Software upgrade thread Jul 2008 (forum) ↩
  83. Redesign feedback Feb 2013 (forum) ↩
  84. Tapatalk disabled (forum) ↩
  85. Forum update - bug reports here please (forum) ↩
  86. Preservation of Wetpixel (forum) ↩
  87. Waterpixels is now up and running (forum) ↩
  88. What is the story of Wetpixel’s survival? (forum) ↩
  89. Is Wetpixel like the Flying Dutchman? (forum) ↩