History
DarkScience is a network created by and for people who like technology, as well as a place where programmers, security consultants and sysadmins can be treated mostly like normal human beings. The original idea was to make an alternative to bluehell, with a focus on being more mature and meritocratic, and could eventually become a network in it's own right.
2003: Early History
DarkScience went live in March of 2003 as a fork of bluehell, typically filled with many senior members of the numerous communities there and also senior staff. The idea was to create a safe haven for more technically oriented users, with more mature discussion, free of the politics and verbose new users which plagued bluehell.
2003-2008: Before dijit
In February of 2008 Planet-Sec IRC Network merged with DarkScience. Planet-sec was a close knit group of like minded individuals that share an interest in security and programming, and were participating is various projects along with DarkScience, those included a SIP service, various wargames and a BBS.
As with everything, DarkScience has evolved and changed over time, as such during mid-2009 there was a turnover of staff, we believe this to be for the betterment of the network. Which at that time, was almost dead, after so many years of faithful service. The new staff succeeded in reviving the network. Which is now here to stay, just like it was meant to be, with multi-headed cells capable of independent thought and control. We may have lost a lot of people in the process, but the network, and the community shall survive and thrive.
2008: ProwL's fate
In late 2008, DarkScience was managing many communities- many of which went against the founding principles which gave birth to the network. One of these communities, was, regretfully very hostile and filled with egotistical members with large botnets.. This led to darkscience being hit with "shoot the messenger" style attacks for almost an entire year.. This led to ProwL having a small nervous breakdown and leaving the community, to travel with one of the female IRC community members: onesilentrose.
The community channels were recreated on the oftc network and irc.darkscience.net pointed to them. ProwL hadn't been in the main IRC lobby in months, was nowhere to be seen on the network and his address was bouncing emails, He was spotted using a few sites, but didn't seem to want anything to do with darkscience. With limited staff and tools things quickly started deteriorating. Eventually the channels died altogether. Various conspiracy theories emerged, some people cried, and there was talk of adapting a political thriller starring Michael Fassbender.
A few months later, a few regulars decided ProwL wasn't coming back any time soon, and began planning a project former users could gather around. After discussing if there was a risk of angering ProwL's ghost and if there's such a thing as too much porn, we rounded up some developers and had a basic network up before the end of the year in 2009.
2009-present: Notable Events
In January 2012, DarkScience merged with Sector5D, which is a friendly community of individuals with an interest in programming, system administration, and has a large electronic engineering following, to this day the merge remains active and they are some of the most appreciated additions to the community.
As of 2013, DarkScience participates in the joint coalition between itself and 'darchoods' a collective of web developers and programmers, with an interesting following of narcotics experts and code 'ninjas'.