Bukanator

**Bukanator** was the pseudonym of a Lonelygirl15 fan who posted comments to her vblogs on YouTube and ran the lonelygirl15.com website and Phorum as a fan site. On his YouTube profile, Bukanator described himself as a 37-year-old San Francisco Web designer with an interest in photography. As a character, Buka was developed and manned briefly by Grant Steinfeld. The Bukanator character continued to operate the fansite well after Steinfeld's exit from the project sometime in late June or very early July 2006 by Miles Beckett.

"A Tribute to Lonelygirl15" went live in early July, on the heels of the Grillz video, claiming to be a brand-new domain and fansite. This debut was announced and promoted through links and comments on both the lonelygirl15 and the danielbeast YouTube accounts.

By mid-July, however, fans had discovered that the Creators had in fact purchased the lonelygirl15.com domain in May, a full month before Bree started her vlogs. For the first time, the LG15 fan site quickly found itself at the eye of a storm of suspicion. When the domain registration discrepancy was revealed by fans, Bukanator claimed that Daniel had actually registered the website as a joke to tease Bree about how she would become famous if she joined YouTube. The story went that while Daniel had registered lonelygirl15.com, he had no real plans of using it, and when Bukanator e-mailed him asking permission to make a fan site, Daniel handed the already registered name over to be developed.

Despite the initial interest over the site's mysterious evolution, as a website lonelygirl15.com remained almost completely stagnant. Bukanator uploaded the videos, but with virtually no additional promotion of the site or its forum (which were silent) almost no one ever went to it. Finally a few core fans began talking at the forums and eventually a community developed, though none of this had anything to do with actions on the site administrator's part -- in fact, Bukanator was widely criticized by the fans at the forum for being a poor moderator. They made many pleas for improvements to the site and especially the forum. The forum was eventually replaced with an improved forum with threaded article and more moderators. But, questions still remained as to how independent the forum was. Frustration eventually led a group of fans to create and move to an alternate fan site, The Children of Anchor Cove, and virtually all forum members joined it, leaving the official forum near silent for a period of time.

Many new fans still came to lonelygirl15.com, and although no longer administered by Bukanator, the forum again became widely used.

## The Legacy Continues

The "Bukanator" name has continued in usage as a nickname for subsequent site administrators. After Steinfeld left the project, the name "Bukanator" was still used by the site administrator, Miles Beckett. Many fans have dubbed this the reign of Bukanator II.

Lonelygirl15 fan Terryfic became moderator and assumed the title of Bukanator III, until stepping down on Oct. 20th, 2006.

Shortly thereafter, TWJaniak became the Web Master and a site administrator of lonelygirl15.com, also known as Bukanator IV. On Jan. 9, 2007 TWJaniak announced he would soon be stepping down.

TWJaniank's departure left Broken Kid as the remaining site administrator, earning him the title of Bukanator V.