Mercury was started on January 16, 2004 as Water Ripple, a forum dedicated to uniting people from all around the world to meet together and expand their horizons. Since the beginning, Mercury Forums has attempted to create a community to show off people's talents and bring a wide variety of interests to the table for discussion. Even today it has members from all across the world--from Canada and the United States to the Netherlands, Great Britain, and even Australia. Mercury is an excellent place to get to know people.

Mercury Forums has not been without its troubles. Crystal, Mercury's "webmistress," decided to move the forums early on, going from Invisionfree to PHPBB on her new host, Kumoko, run by Nyro. That soon got hacked, so Crystal moved the phpbb forums to another site, under a friend of hers named Shadow Alex. That was also destroyed, deleted by Alex's host with no explaination. Crystal decided finally that Invisionfree was the place to stay, and Nemphtis of Clan EDGE UK told her about TheIcy. She soon signed up there for free hosting and Mercury expanded to a website.

Thanks to a competition at Admin Fusion, Crystal and company won $250, with which they purchased a vBulletin license. They then had to pay for Invisionfree to make them a backup so they could move the forums. This happened in October 2006.

After a while, Iceman handed over TheIcy to Icepick, who managed the site poorly. It started getting attacked by malware and eventually Icepick shut down the site. He wasn't going to even tell his members the site was getting shut down but a moderator convinced him of doing so. He still shut the place down early and Crystal lost all the forum and topsite information. She had to restart the forums from scratch, though she could keep her vBulletin license, and thanks to Koby of Forgotten Memories, she was able to be hosted on the Kametsu server.

Once that was set up, Krys volunteered to help and Crystal made her an administrator. Since then, Krys has helped bring about many changes that have enhanced Mercury and made it an even better community. Later, in August of 2007, Retropusso joined the crew as a moderator, and in December of 2007, katiekat and Cryssychu were made Roleplaying Moderators.

The current website layout was designed by Crystal; the forums' banner was designed by Sonicbomb77 and the layout by Crystal.

Mercury's goals are threefold: to bring as many people together as possible, to give every artist a chance to have their work published and to receive exposure, and lastly, to offer enough so that every person has something to relate to. We do this by offering forums, an RPG (automatic) and RP (text-based), several subject forums, an arcade, and contests and interviews for artists. We are always looking to put more on our site so everyone can participate.

Thanks goes to all the members who have stuck with Mercury through thick and thin, especially those who have added content to the site. A very special thanks goes to Fritz, who has done a lot to help the site expand and stuck with Crystal since the very first time she mentioned she wanted to run a forum and site. Also, thank you Krys and Retropusso for volunteering and being wonderful people to come to.

Thanks to Nyro, who originally helped Mercury gain its strength. She put up with all the files Crystal uploaded and was always the one to help. Also, thanks should go to Alex, for hosting Mercury temporarily and trying hard to fix the problems with hosting.

Thank you to Iceman and the rest of the kind staff at TheIcy for hosting Mercury temporarily. Um, I guess thank you Icepick for shutting TheIcy down so Mercury could get a better, more reliable host. =)

Thanks to Ivan and Krys, who linked to us in an attempt to get us more exposure.

Finally, a very special thank you goes to Koby for hosting Mercury and putting up with Crystal's weird questions. Thank you VERY much for saving our skins.