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. Bukanator claimed to be a Web designer with an interest in photography. As a character, he was manned briefly by Grant Steinfeld. The character of Bukanator continued to operate the board well after Steinfeld's exit from the project sometime in late June or early July 2006. It is unknown who moderating the fansite as "Bukanator" in his absence.
The character of Bukanator was supposed to appear like a regular fan. His lonelygirl15 fansite went live with claims of being a brand-new domain and fansite in early July, on the heels of the Grillz video. 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 domain had in fact been purchased 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 (reasons for this have been given as either because Daniel told Bree if she ever started blogging he bet she'd become famous and would need a fan site, or that Daniel registered the site because Bree bragged if she were to ever upload vblogs to youtube she'd become famous). While "Daniel" had supposedly registered lonelygirl15.com, at that time had no real plans of using it, so the story went that "Bukanator" e-mailed him asking permission to make a fan site and Daniel handed the already registered one over to be developed.
Following Steinfeld's departure and the subsequent mystery over the site's evolution, lonelygirl15.com remained almost completely stagnant. "Bukanator" would upload the videos, but with virtually no 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 was built up there, 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, and despite the occasional promise he'd do something about it, the site's moderator never took any action. 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 once again.
