PenDolSa

펜돌사 PenDolSa, shortened PDS, is one of the major Korean Pen Spinning Communities.

History

After the advent of Pencil Turning Cafe on Daum's 'Cafe' forum service. Mr. LSC created PenDolSa on Daum Cafe in 2003. The name means "People who spin the pen" in Korean. Notably, he undertook a project to create a video titled 'PenDolSa 1st', which went viral in the early internet. Mr. LSC used videos from the Pencil Turning Cafe's Hall of Fame from 2002 in order to create the video, leaving a short apology in the end of the video that translates to "It's a bit long, but thank you for watching to the end. I'm sorry for making this video without getting permission from the people who recorded them.". The video also included a link to the forum on Daum.

PenDolSa 1st did not immediately increase the popularity of the PenDolSa forum on Daum, but it attracted the attention of TV producers and the traditional media. In August of 2003, Korean pen spinners appeared on a program called TV 특종놀라운세상(TV special amazing world) aired by Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation. This increased the members of the PenDolSa forum from 3000 to 100000 within a month, which necessitated the implementation of a new post permission ranking system to deal with the greatly increased traffic. The PenDolSa series of board collaborations continued, but this time they used only combos submitted directly to them. Additionally, they produced a joint collaboration with UPSB known as UPSB + PenDolSa, released in two parts.

PenDolSa also had a pen store: Penspinstore, which sold unique versions of comssa pens. Mr. LSC owned both the store and the forum, which led to large amounts of advertising and promoting the store inside the PenDolSa forum, which was not viewed favorably by the forum's community. On August 28th, 2005, a hacker transferred Mr. LSC's admin role to his own account, removed the admin permissions of other members and wrote offensive messages to Mr. LSC. The changes made by the attack were reverted, but this did nothing to quell the unrest about Mr. LSC's promotion of his business.

In February 2006, due to disagreements between admins of PenDolSa, the UKPS community was formed during a split away from PenDolSa, later to become the KPSA community. Most of the experienced pen spinners moved from PenDolSa to KPSA over time, though both communities remained active. In 2007 KTH from the community won the Pen Spinning World Tournament 2007, but later international achievements became claimed by KPSA instead, with KTH even entering the Pen Spinning World Tournament 2009 under KPSA instead of PenDolSa. This led to damage to PenDolSa's reputation, with the rampant advertising and little international involvement by this point leading many to associate the name only with the store.

From 2011 onward there was a decline in activity on PenDolSa, and indeed in the Korean community as a whole as many members went on to university or were enlisted in mandatory military service. From 2011 to 2016 the Naver PenDolSa forum was used, and in 2016 another group of spinners split off from PenDolSa to form a private Google Plus community that would become KIPS (Korean Institute for Pen Spinning).