Great.la

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Great.la
Opened: 16th February 2006
Language: English
Hotel: Habbo.com.sg (until merge)
Habbo.com (International)
Owners: Staircase


Great.la was an official fansite on Habbo.com.sg before the great hotel merge in 2010 and continued to remain as an official fansite on Habbo.com (International) until its closure in late 2012 along with several other previously popular fansites such as FlameHabbo. It was also one of only two fansites with an official status on Habbo Singapore to acquire the same status on the merged hotel (with the other being HabboHut).

History

The user "Staircase" first developed Great.la as a fansite for the Singaporean hotel on February 16th, 2006, with the oldest available screenshot of the site displaying comments from the 17th February 2006. However, the registration of the sites URL occurred on the 23rd June 2005 meaning plans for the site had occurred long before then. The very first version was incredibly simplistic consisting of a grey background and 12 links on the left-hand side (of which only nine led to information sources) - comments/updates were centred on the homepage and displayed vertically based on the date. Great.la managed to achieve official fansite status just under 3 months later on May 4th, 2006.

Sometime March-October 2006, the site was massively updated to include better graphical qualities and more links. Member statistics were also displayed and due to the implementation of a forum, statistics regarding post count and thread count were also put in place. By November 17th, 2006 the site was in its 3rd version, the registered member count had reached 1177, news articles 1607 and comments 14,637 - rivalry between other fansites such as Habborly had also increased. Although at this point in time a "main site" still didn't exist and forums were dominant.

On October 13th 2007 Great.la restarted as a forum powered by Invision Power Board. The database of the former website had been accidentally deleted, resulting in the loss of all 50,000+ posts, 2,000+ news articles, and over 2,000 registered users. V4 strictly speaking (but referred to as GL2 as a way of restarting Great.la from the ground) was launched a few months later on December 21st, 2007.

GL2.2, GL3 and GL3.1 were all new versions developed in 2008 which brought back various features such as blogs as articles, as well as converting to a vBulletin powered forum system.