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 developed and 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 very early July 2006. It is unknown who moderated the fansite as "Bukanator" in his absence.

"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 site's mysterious evolution, as a website lonelygirl15.com as 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, 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.