[J m HofMarN]

So, sometimes these forums, with their rich and elaborate history, can seem daunting to new members. Indeed, some folks scarcely comprehend the terror wrought by Hannibal, or the reason that we look to a previous epoch as The Great Homicest of Snake Logan.

And naturally so. All the myriad history, both good and bad, of the forums is stored in around 200,000 posts. Sometimes its hard to look through a thousand troll posts just to find the one that's particularly funny, and new members might not even know what to look for. How many even of the old salts recall the debates between titans like Civ and Mike Mac?

So, I figured I'd start a sort of thread wherein everyone could post their recollections and research on important forum matters, and trivial ones too! When did sub forums start? When did they die? What really nifty members have disappeared? When did post wars begin and end? Who shot Mr. Burns? etc etc.

To start out in handling this scientifically, I think we need to divide our forum history into seperate epochs both by chronology and events.

My suggestion would be to divide it thusly, from begining to end:

The Dawning Days: 2003-2004
The Starwars Ascendancy
Hannibal Strikes back
Post Races and the golden age of the screening room
Pirates!
Rise of the Ramblomites
The Great Homicest of Snake Logan
Time of the Troutkrieg
Common Era

I probably missed/overlapped a good many, and some can be combined. I don't have dates for all of them either. Feel free to contribute your own. Once we agree on a chapter list and timeline, we can start doing research to fill them in.

[Heccubus]

Also, I do not want to learn anything of Icey and TooChic's relations....

Nor does anybody else.

[Chyld]

I did agree to help, so lets see what I can remember offhand.

There are in fact three seperate waves of people hitting up the Fully Ramblomatic Forums:

1.) Early 2004: The first migration over from EZboards, when Yahtzee started updating from Australia. This was a fairly small migration, and was made up of me, Jane, Icey, and the now departed little princess and Misty.
2.) Sort of about 2006: When the XDAS games were at their most popular.
3.) Late 2007 - Now: When ZP did lots of things that completly overshadowed YZs other work.

There's also been an ebb and flow of hosted forums, for various members' websites. Most of these can be found in the Deleted Forums section, and can be dated from the last post in the forum. Obviously the only ones left are LnE, FR, JP, my site, and a link to the TCR forums.

Various on-forumy forum additions have included the Arcade (2004-2005), where kdogg posted quite impossible Tetris scores, and the first-wave Fullyramblos fought over the top score on Snake) and the Gallery (2005-2007, sadly no longer supported). For basically every year apart from 2003, there has been a thread for member pictures, featuring many, many pictures of me drunk.

Great trolls of the past are more your domain, JM, since they always seemed to bounce crap off of you.

There have been many attempts at postraces over the year, but none so epic as the 2004 Race To 2000 Posts of Chyld vs Jane. I think we bathed the entire board in posts then. And I won. Just.

More to come if you can give me some prompts.

[arien]

Also, I do not want to learn anything of Icey and TooChic's relations....

Nor does anybody else.

I do!

But I feel sad that I've only been around for roughly half the stuff on J m HofMarN's list. At least I was there for Snake Logan and Bond! D:

[J m HofMarN]

Yeah that was the post race I was refering to in my first chapter list. Guess it should be singular. Ok, so I can add a 2004 date and we now look like this:

The Dawning Days: 2003-2004
The Starwars Ascendancy 2004
Hannibal Strikes back 2004
Jane and Chyld's post duel 2004
Puffin Lemur war - 2004-2005
and the golden age of the screening room 2005-2006
Pirates! of the debate club - 2006?
The Demi-trolls - 2007?
Rise of the Ramblomites late 2007 - 2008
The Great Homicest of Snake Logan 2008
Time of the Troutkrieg 2008
Common Era 2008-2009

Chyld- Great Trolls is arguably an oxymoron. But I'm happy to be nominated as Defence Against The Dark Trolls teacher.

Does everyone think the time line looks ok? 05 and 06 DO look a bit bare to me. What happened in those two years?

This post has been edited by J m HofMarN: 17 November 2008 - 02:16 PM

[Ninja Duck]

Boards with nails in them? Those were false pretenses?

I think Princess Yummyboobs might deserve an era, although I don't remember when that was.

EDIT: ...I'm getting Google ads for testicle infections. I blame Otal. Yeah, definitely Otal.

This post has been edited by Ninja Duck: 17 November 2008 - 11:35 PM

[J m HofMarN]

Otal- Ah I remember Revan, gotta look up some of those posts.

Chyld - Yeah, its definately not a good idea to just focus on when people arrived. Events are whats important.

Hecc/Slade - Honestly, I'm going to have to disagree. The explosion of FR should be treated as a seperate event, or at least a causative event, of troutkreig. And I may catch some flak for this, but I don't think we should treat the FR forums solely as a cancerous entity. They deserve a voice in our discourse too, and as soon as we locate one of them who can speak english, we should ask them to join in. Seriously though, FR getting trolled is not just a normal event, and they're not all trolls there, so when someone bugs them it deserves the same disapproval as it does when that screaming vortex spawns a troll that bugs everyone else.

Ninja Duck - Although we did not find any evidence of BWNITs, that doesnt mean they werent there. My pretenses werent false, just unproven. AND THERES NOT A DAMN THING THE KING OF SWEDEN CAN DO ABOUT IT!

Also, I've been getting those all over the place too and I have no idea why. All my ads are for nut cancer or lumps.

[Gobbler]

We should mention our very own myriad-man barend in some kind of way, though I don't really know where... "Unimportant yet still irritating milestones" maybe?

[David-kyo]

Instead of running all Internet White Knight style to Dee's rescue, let's just agree to leave that out. It was a stupid situation, and frankly it's not worth discussing to the extent that it has been.

So it's gonna be a recollection of forum history with the more embarrassing pieces of history omitted.

EDIT: 'd.

This post has been edited by David-kyo: 18 November 2008 - 03:22 AM

[Deucaon]

So does anyone want to make a "Wikipedia" style online cyclopaedia for chefelf.com (the title of it must contain either the word "wiki" or "pedia" otherwise it doesn't count and bad things will happen)?

[J m HofMarN]

Gobbler - However did I forget that. Yeah, Barend is like, what, six percent of the total posts? So he definately needs his place in history. Maybe I can link that interview I did with him.

So it's gonna be a recollection of forum history with the more embarrassing pieces of history omitted

Nonsense! A history without embarassment would be no history at all. What would our past be like if we couldnt read up on the time that Woodrow Wilson got pantsed by half of the Republican party? So, no, I'm definately not for skimming over stuff just because its contentious or some people think its mean to write about events that clearly happened and were noteworthy.

Deaucon - I think that's kind of what this is doing, except in a more streamlined fashion. We can use the history to link to posts and other articles on peoples sites so as to make it like a general primer and index. Also,

bad things will happen

What are these bad things?


Chyld- I think we can have someone uninvolved write a NPOV article regarding Dee "he came here, he spammed a lot of nonsense, he went crazy and got banned, people aren't sure if he was a troll or just mentally challenged" and then have Gobbler and Spoon both offer their own subjective views.

And for goodness sake, doesnt anyone recall Civ VS Mike Mac? I was told those were legendary debate deals.

[barend]

^^All my best quotes are in deleted threads

Flame wars bring out the best in me.

ND: Surely Princess Yummyboobs goes in whenever the article on her appeared on the News Desk?

On Barend: He's always had a scary post count, it'd be like noting times I had a name with no vowels, or someone's avatar change. Perhaps we could mention when he hit 10k posts?

Yeah....

Maybe you can squeez me in somewhere.

reaching 10k, Chefelf Lord of the Rings (over 1 year of photoshoping for your entertainment), NAMING PRINCESS YUMMYBOOBS, 1 Panel at a time comic thread contributions, the ERECTRON 3000, Ask Barend, The Supes and Barend 'welcome to Australia, let's go to the Belgian Beer Cafe' commity for International Chefelfers (The SABWTALGTTBBCCFIC), Poster of the CNL 100,00th post ever,KOTOR profiles, etc.etc.

You people have the worst memory.

I'm disgusted at the lack of mention of Just Your Average Movie Goer who suparsed me in contributions of photoshopped epic satire sagas, who started the longest thread ever (PRT), also contributed greatly to the 1 Panel at a time thread, who was the highest post count holder until he got distracted by girls, and was pure awesome.

Honorable mention to John Gutner too.

ALso, Madam Corvax needs mentioning as well as Helena, especially for her fantastic take on KOTOR.

and Chyld for "CAKEZ"

This post has been edited by barend: 18 November 2008 - 10:36 PM

[J m HofMarN]

Barend - Did you think I named it "The Golden Age of the Screening Room" because of the time I posted three chapters of one of my sci fi novels? Cmon man, you know I remember LOTR, although that thing Moviegoer did began to rely too much on breasts and I dropped out. But still! Yeah they're both going down in the books.

Oh and speaking of Chyld, the puffin lemur thing has to get in there somewhere too, that was like the civil war of the forums or something. Or the crooked election..............................
But because we're glossing over things, I would like to point out that we need to keep a neutral point of view on any and all wild accusations of me rigging the puffin-lemur vote.

[civilian_number_two]

JYAMG was great in the screening room and the one-panel-at-a-time comix. I had some classic disagreements with him over his insistence that the content be family-oriented yet breast-obsessed. In the comic thread, he consistently avoided innuendo (and one case of innu-ear-do) presented by Barend, turning the story wherever he could to the guys staring at Cynthia's boobs. He was an odd bird.

Mike Mac from NYU had some controversial opinions about movies, and was fun to disagree with. Sadly he asploded in rage at JYAMG one day and then put the credit for that asplosion on the death of a fellow NYU student. He promised to come back when he got over that. We never saw him again.

My favourite troll was Hannibal. Full of all the nonsense that is trollery, but with the incongruous bonus that about 20% of his content verged on interesting. Naturally that means that 20% of his content was coied and pasted from other sites, but some of it was fun to read. His period of posting STAR WARS-related pictures was delightfully insane.

Helena and of course Madam Corvax I miss the most of the posters who eventually came to their senses and gave up on this place. MC's long review of the LOTR Special Editions is one of my favorite threads of antiquity.

[J m HofMarN]

Civ- Glad I'm not the only one who thought that the boob obsession was a bit odd. Especially in a sci fi production...

I looked into Mike Mac's posts, and it seems he was one of the most prequel and ROTJ friendly of the Old Guard. 9I may be mistaken but I think I even saw him defend Temple of Doom and decision to make Anakid. So I can see where the debates would come up. Shame I didnt pop by in too many of those.

And MC rocked too. Maybe we should have a little note in the history when a beloved forum member disappeared, and sort of a silly theory of where they are now or something. Maybe as a footnote to The Fall of the Old Republic, which is the name I'm using for the disappearance of many posters. So the new dealy looks like this:

The Dawning Days: 2003-2004
The Starwars Ascendancy and The Great Debates 2004
Golden Age of the News forum 2004-2005
Attack of the Hannibal 2004
Jane and Chyld's post duel 2004
Puffin Lemur war - 2004-2005 (with point counterpoint)
The Prequelists Strike Back (whenever the fuck Jariten joined. That dude was hardcore Prequelist)
The Golden Age Of The Screening Room 2005-2006
Pirates! of the debate club - 2006?
The fall of the Old Republic 2006-2007
The Demi-trolls - 2007? (with point counterpoint)
The not so great debates 2007-2008
Rise of the Ramblomites late 2007 - 2008
The Great Homicest of Snake Logan 2008
Time of the Troutkrieg 2008
Common Era 2008-2009

Special Features:

Where are they now?
Point/Counterpoints
Defense Against The Dark Trolls
Great threads of Antiquity
Important and/or irritating milestones

So, ok, rawk out. If everyone thinks this about covers it, we can all start figuring out what to actually put in these chapters. I'd also like to have them nailed down to at least a certain month if not a certain day. Troll based eras are easy to date as they have join dates, others may be a bit more vague.

Chyld tells me that I can create a spot on Jelly Pufflemur and he can set it up with tapestry images and illuminated manuscript and old timey font, so once it's all done we can pretty it up and put it on the interwebs.

This post has been edited by J m HofMarN: 19 November 2008 - 05:06 AM