What happened to DotWavWizards?

Were you a member of DotWavWizards IRC/PHP forum in the late 00's?

I've been contacted by 2 different members this month! Sorry about the abrupt closure. This is the admin PatrikWithJustAK, I made the Sunday Smoothies. I had a lot going on, and a lot of excuses can be made. But here's how it really went down. I started building that site before I started high school.

I was born in 1993 to a working-class family navigating the slow collapse of financial stability in America. My parents divorced when I was young, and my early years were split between two households. Even as a kid, I felt the weight of instability. But in the middle of it all, I found one constant: a deep curiosity about how things worked—especially computers.

That curiosity took shape in third grade when my mom’s print shop job came to an end. As the business shut its doors, I spotted an old office computer collecting dust in a corner. I asked the owner if I could take it home. He agreed, and that hand-me-down machine became my first tech playground.

Once I had the keyboard under control (thanks to a copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing) I became a feral child of the early 2000s internet. Forums, IRC chats, and bulletin boards were my teachers. I wanted to understand everything. I learned to disassemble and reassemble that PC completely, guided by old CompTIA and Cisco manuals I found online. I learned about SATA and SCSI, motherboards and RAM, CPUs, thermal paste, BIOS settings, and the difference between a chipset and a chip.

But hardware was just the beginning. With GRUB, I set up dual-boot systems and explored Linux alongside Windows. I installed Debian and started programming in C, mostly to see what I could do—and how far I could push myself. Truth be told, I kind of sucked at systems programming. But I stuck with it long enough to understand the layers beneath the software I was using.

Eventually, I wanted to build something that people could actually interact with. I spun up a LAMP stack on DreamHost and launched my first real project: a PHPBB forum called DotWavWizards, dedicated to online discussion of music production. That shift from low-level to high-level was liberating. Suddenly, I wasn’t just studying computers—I was using them to connect with others.

To my surprise, the forum took off. By 2007, DotWavWizards had over 4,000 members and a steady stream of active threads. It became a lively hub of creativity and collaboration. We had weekly threads with 10/20 contributors each, and some members forming IRL bands!

PHP is clunky and one of my least favorite languages in present-day 2025, but back then it felt like magic—accessible, forgiving, and just powerful enough to bring my ideas to life.

But as DotWavWizards grew, life around me was unraveling. In 2007, our mortgage became untenable. The financial strain at home reached a breaking point. At just 14, I could no longer afford the $10.95 monthly DreamHost bill, let alone the spare time to develop and maintain the site. I made one final post, announcing the end of the forum, and prepared for a move that was entirely out of my hands. A generous stranger (Caesar) paid to keep the server online for the rest of the year. At the time, the least of my worries was the digital music I had collaborated on with strangers.

On December 31st, 2008, just as the year closed out, DotWavWizards went officially defunct. It was the first real thing I had built that mattered to other people—and I had to let it go. No I did not keep backups. I can not get back the music you made in your childhood. I'm sure that is hard for some of the members trying to recover their digital history, but those tracks are long erased. I still make music though! I tried to capture my feelings on this in the following track:

If you are anyone you know was a member of DotWavWizards, sorry for the abrupt ending to it. I often consider rebuilding a collaborative music platform on the internet. Maybe one day we can put together a new Sunday Smoothie. Feel free to reach out any time patrik@patrikwithjustak.com.