I wish I could have been here when Asherlee was around, she sounded like a cool person....anyways, I REALLYwant some MODS to come and SHARE what they can about AG... *queue any Mods watching silently...*
I made a story a while back that was about the history of AG and did some research on the subject then, and I remember right before I ended up letting the thread die Strop put down all the info concerning what happened after he joined. If I can find that old thread I could show it to you I suppose.
OK I found the old thread...its a alot older then I remember, like 5 months old or something. Anyways here is what Strop said back then:
I joined at the end of March...the first Sonny and The Last Stand were released around then though I can't remember the exact timing. Devoidless and Dragonmistress became moderator sometime in May, I believe, and Ubertuna shortly...before? that. Moegreche and Devoidless (and to a lesser extent myself) also teamed up to establish "the Great Debate", a series of accounts on which people could engage in a rigorous intellectual discussion on certain topics. Moe, ever the visionary, wanted to encourage structured and critical thinking. If ever mentioned, Devoidless will undoubtedly boast that he beat me, and was the only person to have done so. In my defence, all it demonstrated was that he knew how to search the Star Wars Wiki, and that I'm not as much of a Star Wars geek as he is :P The whole "switchfoot" stuff happened around the start of June. John's Compulse Tournament was held not long after that, around the time I became a moderator (end of June). Shortly after that, SHOPS was disbanded due to corruption of certain internal elements. In July, I think, was the scene of the Great Reshuffle. The subforums were all moved around, a lot of spam threads were deleted and the first "no AP" section, the Forum Games was established. It was a few months until the Newcomers Forum was established. What else was there? kingofgames made the big push for both number 1 and the first gold king rank, heralding the advent of ranking madness. starscreamer, the next points king, went mad shortly after and publicly broadcast threats of suicide all over the forums. It wasn't until early this year that firetail got very active again and took back that rank, and has recently been usurped by Adam. Coupled with this is the growing movement bemoaning the emphasis on points and ranking, along with the well-known fact that a lot of the top 100 do tend to engage in "criminal and other undesirable activities" including covert mass spam, heavy use of inane messenger chat and mini-modding. No history would be complete without talking about the art contests and the user-based armatar contests too, but that's a lot of detail. There was a time where the Art forum really wasn't particularly active. As far as I can remember, it was actually shottytotheface who started the epic "draw mudkip" thread, which spawned the infamous "butt-rash" joke (courtesy of Kingryan's perverted interpretation of my...perverted pictures...), which remains probably the only thread that you can see Carlie, John AND DAN posting on the same page. Dan (and John) have maybe made one forum appearance since, and I wouldn't know where to find it. Why am I harping on about this for so long? Because it was really from this that the idea for an art contest was spawned. Carlie was the original judge, throughout the first and initially the second incarnation. Arguably the ASC has one of the most distinctive histories of any established structure in ArmorGames. It's the scene of many takeovers, passovers, drama and, well...art theft and banning :\\\\ Even I left a bit of a stern message when I resigned from judging after three months of it (not least because I went overseas). From the ASC people wondered why there was nothing for poetry and much later on, writing, and so those contests were also established. Estel became a moderator...nuts, I can't remember when, but he was the next, followed by Zophia in December, shortly before I left for a month. The other bit of history (still in the making) would be the OCT/STG (whatever you want to call it) created by Cenere, the Mixed World Tournament. This would where the manifestation of AG personalities came to the fore, with much discussion of recognised figures on AG. Incidentally the mechanics of this tournament were what the current Way of Moderation is based upon.
Here is the actual thread for anyone who wants to look at it:
IN THE BEGINNING... *The first records of GoG are from October 13,2005 according to the web archives *Games of Gondor was launched September 28, 2005 *Sometime between late 2005 and the beginning of 2006, it changed from Games of Gondor to Armorgames. *In late 2007-early 2008 AG 2.0 was released *12/19/2007: Carlie joins *In Early 2008, many of our current users (including Firetail_Madness) joined. *Chat was taken away *At some point in mid-May there was the Switchfoot incident which kept it to where no one got a second chance after perma-banned *Strop became a mod * Forums were rearranged in the Summer *And more people went to AG, for the games (like Sonny) and the forums. *Zophia became a mod 200,000 users *In early to mid 2009, many of our well known users became active again *420 drove some of us insane *300,000 users *fst6 was banhammered *Gantic was made a mod *Which brings us to now. THE END
The story itself though talks mainly about the BETA phase of the site, but I stopped writing it after awhile...for whatever reason.(I can't really remember why I stopped)
Anyways yeah thats all the info I have for right now.
according to meebo, chat was taken june 19-20 2008
OK then let me rearrange this real quick.
IN THE BEGINNING... *The first records of GoG are from October 13,2005 according to the web archives *Games of Gondor was launched September 28, 2005 *Sometime between late 2005 and the beginning of 2006, it changed from Games of Gondor to Armorgames. *In late 2007-early 2008 AG 2.0 was released *12/19/2007: Carlie joins *In Early 2008, many of our current users (including Firetail_Madness) joined. *At some point in mid-May there was the Switchfoot incident which kept it to where no one got a second chance after perma-banned *Strop became a mod *Chat was taken away * Forums were rearranged in the Summer *And more people went to AG, for the games (like Sonny) and the forums. *Zophia became a mod 200,000 users *In early to mid 2009, many of our well known users became active again *420 drove some of us insane *300,000 users *fst6 was banhammered *Gantic was made a mod *Which brings us to now. THE END
