In early 2010, Two members of the mer community- Mermaid Iona aka Winged Mermaid, and Merman Malinghi- started a forum called "The Mermaids and Mermen Costuming forum", though it was also known by it's url, mer.yuku.com. While other forums existed within the community, most notably seatails.org and mermaidmania.de, both of these focused primarily on mermaids and mermen in movies and television. MerYuku focused on sharing information, especially relating to where to make tails and how to buy them. Additionally it was intended to act as a gathering place for people in the community to congregate and socialize. The site was made for free using the free forum hosting website Yuku.com, which led to its URL being mer.yuku.com. It was made for free both because the people that created it didn't have many resources at their disposal, and because it was hard to justify spending money on something that seems rather unlikely to succeed. The forum's success depended not only on the existence of people who cared about mermaid tails, but also on those people wanting to actually talk to each other and share their ideas. Neither one of these things seemed very reliable. As it turns out, there were enough people, and they did want to talk. within a year the site had over a hundred members and thousands of posts. It was around this time that the idea of making a newer version of the site became a possility. The incentive for the new site was that first, it could be better and more feature rich. second, having its own domain name would add legitimacy, and third, a hosted site run on professional forum software would have greater security that Yuku offered. Today, MerNetwork continues to be a community passionate about merfolk costuming. Our mission is to provide a community for the Merfolk- mermaids and mermen alike, all around the net and the world- where mers can discuss, share, and review all things related to merfolk costuming in a safe environment. |