Well, Furtopia was a bit smallish back when I first got involved. WhiteShepherd has been a friend of mine for quite a while online, and I think he had shown me to the site while we were chatting on FurryMUCK, Yahoo!, or somesuch. I had a look around it, and noticed these pitiful little BBS scripts he was using for boards. Seeing as I had already successfully established a forum over on my main hobby site, furry.ca, I showed WS how those things work and that they're more appealing for people to use, easier to administrate, and whatnot. Well, he liked that concept, so I ended up setting up these forums for him, did the skin and everything to get it going... which is still mostly in use. These forums, from what I can tell, have only added to the success of the site in general. Having built a community here where people can check in with each other on a daily basis seemed to spur the rest of the services into growing along with it.
Benjamin