Beastforum had gotten taken down. There was Zoosbook. I made a few friends there who had been from Beastforum. I caught a computer virus from Zoosbook, so I left. Then I stumbled upon this place. I've been here ever since. It is like home.
One of my good friends has been a moderator on here since ZooVille's inception. He assured me that all the staff members of this website were all legitimate zoos like us. (This was way WAY before I became a mod.) So, I deiced I'd give it a shot back in January. I'm sure glad I did and I love to be here. I'm pretty much addicted to this site! Lol
Ex-Beastforum member here, back when BF closed down and redirected to zooville I thought it was sketchy but nearly a year later I come back and see it's legit and expanded alot more with content and members. Nice!
After zoo activities became illegal in my State in 2019, I went to the Internet to find if there was anyone else bummed about the legislation, and oppression of zoos in general. This led to me discovering how much hatred there was surrounding us, but random searches also led to me finding the zoo community and this site, by way of a forum link talking about my State.
The day I discovered ZooVille was 11/27/2019, so it has almost been a year!
When Beastforum was shutting down, somebody opened a thread asking where everyone was going to. Being a no-good rookie I feared to get out of touch with other zoos because I didn't know anybody at all.
Skimming through the posts, ignoring messengers or pages that required verification, I ended up joining a Discord room, even though Discord was a pain in the ass. It was just meant temporarily until I found something better.
After a while, somebody posted a link to a thread on the old incarnation of Zooville (If I remember correctly, it was @Der.Zoomer or something related to his ostriches, but I'm not sure), whereupon I created my account and well, I've been hooked since
Been on many sites throughout the years and knew about the site for sometime but being I was not a big fan of BF because of the type of people it drew in so I avoided coming here. Then with covid hitting and my already lonely life getting worse with no social life left I thought I would check it out. So far it seems better than BF with rules in place against some abusive material though would like to see something in regards to the destructive act of fence hopping as I seen it pop up and being condoned and even encouraged in some threads.
Used to be on BF by another name before I really had any of my own content, then heard about it while lurking on FORBIDDEN_WEBSITE! after BF shut down. Didn't join until a year ago (ish?) now but in becoming more active I'm happy to see how nice it is here.