The Long Patrol Club was an integral part of the Redwall Online Community. It was founded on August 15, 1996, by M3May (also known as "Martin the Warrior"). Over the years the website hosted book reviews, information, news, artwork, editorials, interviews, forums, puzzles, and games. It was named after the Long Patrol.
History[]
The Long Patrol Club was started in 1996 after two friends had an idea to create an online Redwall club. One of the friends backed out of the project for personal reasons, and the other, M3May, continued with the concept. In the late 1990s, the club's population exceeded 1,000 members in size.
The website was originally hosted on M3May's personal AOL web space, http://members.aol.com/m3may/longpatrol.html.
In 1998, the Long Patrol Club took over responsibilities for hosting the Redwall Ring, a webring for Redwall websites.
In 1999 some downsizing of the website occurred. A key site feature since February 15th, 1997, the Redwall Quiz, was removed.
2000 was the big year for the Long Patrol though. The site moved from the AOL hosting to a real domain, http://www.longpatrolclub.com. Additionally, the Newsline made its move to an "independent" site, hosted by the LP.
The following year, the RWTV aspect of the site was established, a set area just for information on the Redwall TV Series.
The Long Patrol had exclusive interviews with Jack Procher and Daniel Fernandez, (Redwall composers), Glenn Norman and Michelle Goodeve (Redwall TV writers), and Steve Roberts (Redwall TV Editor).
Other main aspects of the club included the Sword of Martin, a pass-a-long story that had been in the process of being written since September 7th, 1996.
The site has grown latent in updates since the mid-2000s, more likely because M3May doesn't have the real time to dedicate to it as often as he used to. For a long time, the Long Patrol Club's news resource, the Newsline, was #1 in delivering Redwall-related news. However, M3May has acknowledged that the site is just a "hobby" for him, and the site itself has not been consistently updated in a while.
The most active part of the site was the forum, which was basically what the site became.
In August 2014, the site received a long-anticipated layout update. It has not been updated since.
Forums[]
The Long Patrol Club was the home of many different forums for communal gatherings.
From February 1997 until January 1998, the first forum was called "The Patroller," a CGI-based guestbook-type form for people to post or chat.
In 1998, this was replaced with a members-only BBS system. Public forums arrived in February 2001 with EZBoard.
In November 2002, the forums moved to their current location on the longpatrolclub.com domain, using the vBulletin software.
Prominent Members[]
Faces of the Long Patrol Club[]
The Long Patrol has had multiple looks over the past decade.
