6 May 2012: Deletion and DoS of
1000 Cats, the cat-diddler already mentioned in this thread
May-June 2012:
Karinzistan and his revolution, which ended with him getting DoS'd - and then coming back almost daily for months
Summer/fall 2012: big increase in the number of adbots
Oct-Nov 2012:
Objectiveland and his ridiculousness, got DoS'd for a suicide by mod thread
Late December 2012:
This idiot2 January 2013: Moratorium on "malicious" content that led to a lot of Nazi-themed nations disappearing pretty much just like that, and others followed in suicide-by-mod
Spring 2013:
"That boring shitty troll", a Nazi/White Pride sort of guy, suspected to be Karinzistan mentioned above
18 July 2013: They finally realized that
Aeazer, DoS since 2005, had two nations that had been active since at least 2008
22 July 2013: The aforementioned The Zeonic States pedo case
13 August 2013:
Verbluffen finally got DoS'd, what a weird dude. He liked to keep coming back for a while too.
Late 2013/early 2014: "mods read TGs" scandal and several high-profile users leaving
27 December 2013:
With Teeth revealing he had actually been DoS for several years, and getting all of his nations nuked because of it
15 February 2014: Closure of the Eternal Thread for two weeks. This and the above are why I consider Feb 2014 to be the end of my heyday/generation on NS
February 2014: Introduction of the R/D/Q thread labeling system in Moderation
15 May 2014:
Novaya Stalina got DoS'd, soiling a lot of real-world nation names (I didn't know who was behind all of them until I did my own research many years later)
Spring/Summer 2014:
Divair and
Thafoo, and their respective demises
22-27 April 2015:
Milograd's suicide-by-mod that got him DoS'd, and then just a few days later our first scripting scandal
2 April 2016: Predator scandal, two DoS's and tons of DEATs due to the use and sharing of a highly illegal script
1 May 2016: May Massacre, mentioned above
Late June 2016: All the ugliness surrounding Brexit, including a big wave of deletions
29 September 2016: The big Reddit boom causing a spike in site activity - and in nations with naughty names
I believe the RWDT, LWDT, and MAGAthread all began in 2016 too.
12 December 2018: The bloodbath of DEATs following the Strasbourg terrorist incident
Late 2019:
Eternal Lotharia, or the guy who diddled his cousin
4 February 2020:
Soldati Senza Confini came back after almost a year of being gone for the sole purpose of committing suicide by mod.
I'm not sure why the banana kid gets mentioned so much as a defining thing for so many people; maybe because for newer users he was the closest thing they've known to the serial spammers we used to get pretty regularly especially back in 2009-2010. I've read about all kinds of colourful characters from back then. BNPs Britain and his summer 2009 porn spam campaign that all resulted from getting his main nation deleted for posting past a ban. Landongrad, i.e. the "anti gingers" idiot. Diatraba, 2010's very own foreign language spammer. Hairless Kitten, nuff said.