Ayenee was a chat-based freeform roleplaying community based in the user-created chatrooms in Yahoo! Chat's Arts and Entertainments section, which opened in 1997. The name Ayenee is a portmanteau of A&E (Arts and Entertainment). Guidelines for the Ayenee community were originally posted on “Kelindil's Site” in 1999. Ayenee's setting was a series of user created rooms; it was a free-form setting with elements of all genres present, from fantasy to science fiction. Sister realms of Ayenee included Nerima (In Yahoo chat's Anime and Manga category), Tenaria (In the Teen category), and Ecniecs (Science category).
Ayenee chat RP was known for its diverse, often high-powered characters, and rooms like:
In chat, many characters were often inspired by popular anime series and fantasy novels. These characters mixed and mingled, creating colorful and unusual sights such as vampires characters fighting Sailor Moon characters.
The user-created rooms of Yahoo chat were unmoderated and became increasingly filled with spam bots and adult content, including rooms with names suggestive of illegal activity. This led to sensational news reports, a lawsuit, an investigation, and to advertisers dropping support for Yahoo chat. In response, Yahoo disabled the ability for users to create chatrooms in June 2005. Without the ability to create rooms, the Ayenee roleplaying community was thrown into disarray and a great exodus ensued in which its members moved to other roleplaying venues, primarily Ayenee.org and Ayenee.com. Yahoo eventually closed its chat site entirely.
In August 2005 the various remnants of Ayenee (including Star Army) petitioned Yahoo to create new Ayenee role-playing chat rooms. The petition was ignored entirely.
The consensus is that the destruction of Ayenee fueled a positive change in the community by forcing player groups to organize, spawning thriving offshoot communities.
In 2000, Wes introduced Ketsurui Yui, Eve, and PNUgen Corporation to Ayenee. These would later develop into the SARPiverse. As PNUgen and Star Army developed, the growing community involved with Wes moved from forums on Network54 and ezBoard and eventually to StarArmy.com in 2003.
Star Army supported Anna, leader of the Ayenee.org community, by sponsoring it through advertisements for the Star Army website and through ezSupporter donations.
Major roleplay events involving both Star Army and Ayenee included:
Getting back and forth between the two universes was accomplished in-character by use of a Transuniversal Teleportation Drive.