Significant Forum Events

[Odreria]

Has there ever been a case of someone impersonating a CTE’d nation?

[Luminesa]

The May Massacre was pretty significant in the short(ish) time I've been here, especially since a couple of those posters were either in groups I knew or in my own region. Getting home from church and seeing that NS is on fire...now that's a Sunday-morning tradition I never thought I'd have.

I have to say that one for me was when moderation helped me against a cyberbully. For all the fighting back and forth we've all done in the last several years, that really was significant to me, if for nobody else.

[Bombadil]

When the forum was split into Liberal and Conservative was particularly fun resulting in a long Haiku battle.

I remember Haiku Fighting, not sure if that's what you mean? Funniest and best haiku were from some Australian guy, not me sadly.

Lunatic Goofballs was involved. It might even have been his haiku that rapped off "Kung-Fu Fighting" and gave the thread it's name.

I told the mods not to make LG a Mod. "Don't put that burden on him, you'll kill the funny" I said. But you can't tell Mods anything.

The Liberal and Conservative Zones were an April Fool's joke by the mods. Once everyone started posting in both the joke was worn out and somehow they merged the forums again. But I wonder if the joke inspired the LWDT and RWDT's?

It's also when we discovered Reppy had a sister, who had a post count permanently set at 0, something I was very jealous of.

[Heloin]

I remember Haiku Fighting, not sure if that's what you mean? Funniest and best haiku were from some Australian guy, not me sadly.

Lunatic Goofballs was involved. It might even have been his haiku that rapped off "Kung-Fu Fighting" and gave the thread it's name.

I told the mods not to make LG a Mod. "Don't put that burden on him, you'll kill the funny" I said. But you can't tell Mods anything.

The Liberal and Conservative Zones were an April Fool's joke by the mods. Once everyone started posting in both the joke was worn out and somehow they merged the forums again. But I wonder if the joke inspired the LWDT and RWDT's?

It's also when we discovered Reppy had a sister, who had a post count permanently set at 0, something I was very jealous of.

That’s amazing.

[Greater Cesnica]

Wew. This thread became big. Now I'm debating how much of this is Wikipedia-notable. So far I've put the megathread bans and the roleplaying ban incidents here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NationStates#Forum_Board

I think I can probably add a few more notable events/incidents. Anyone care to compile a bunch of major events? To appease my copious levels of laziness of course.

[Twicetagram and JYPe]

I remember Haiku Fighting, not sure if that's what you mean? Funniest and best haiku were from some Australian guy, not me sadly.

Lunatic Goofballs was involved. It might even have been his haiku that rapped off "Kung-Fu Fighting" and gave the thread it's name.

I told the mods not to make LG a Mod. "Don't put that burden on him, you'll kill the funny" I said. But you can't tell Mods anything.

The Liberal and Conservative Zones were an April Fool's joke by the mods. Once everyone started posting in both the joke was worn out and somehow they merged the forums again. But I wonder if the joke inspired the LWDT and RWDT's?

It's also when we discovered Reppy had a sister, who had a post count permanently set at 0, something I was very jealous of.

Beautiful

[Mathuvan Union]

has anyone ignored the creation of F7?

[Diarcesia]

has anyone ignored the creation of F7?

I wasn't there, but the splitting of P2TM and F7 would be pretty significant.

[Mathuvan Union]

has anyone ignored the creation of F7?

I wasn't there, but the splitting of P2TM and F7 would be pretty significant.

I'm praising that. 'Does AN like YN' does not fit with '2077: Nuclear Apocalypse'

[Luziyca]

has anyone ignored the creation of F7?

I think it always existed since this forum got created.

But yeah, the split of P2TM and F7 was pretty significant.

[Mathuvan Union]

has anyone ignored the creation of F7?

I think it always existed since this forum got created.

But yeah, the split of P2TM and F7 was pretty significant.

that was more my aim, but yeah

[Luziyca]

Has there ever been a case of someone impersonating a CTE’d nation?

The closest was Ifreann, whose flag until around 2014 or so was an EX-NATION flag edited to read "SEX-NATION," but I don't think there really was. I think I heard of a few people reporting him for the flag because they thought they were pretending to be CTE.

[Mathuvan Union]

Has there ever been a case of someone impersonating a CTE’d nation?

The closest was Ifreann, whose flag until around 2014 or so was an EX-NATION flag edited to read "SEX-NATION," but I don't think there really was. I think I heard of a few people reporting him for the flag because they thought they were pretending to be CTE.

*chuckles*
the insane things people do here...

[Odreria]

Has there ever been a case of someone impersonating a CTE’d nation?

The closest was Ifreann, whose flag until around 2014 or so was an EX-NATION flag edited to read "SEX-NATION," but I don't think there really was. I think I heard of a few people reporting him for the flag because they thought they were pretending to be CTE.

My bad, I meant someone pretending to be a different user that in fact is no longer on the site.

[Katganistan]

I have no idea what he's talking about.

Founded: Antiquity. jackpot

We don't think dyakovo died, we know he did.

We've seen obituaries. That I will not link to, but this time out of privacy.

fair. so did you know him IRL, then? because you would've had to of known his name, right?

Yes, there are people here who knew him IRL, so I would ask you guys to please be respectful and not cause them any upset even unwittingly.

[Reploid Productions]

I remember Haiku Fighting, not sure if that's what you mean? Funniest and best haiku were from some Australian guy, not me sadly.

Lunatic Goofballs was involved. It might even have been his haiku that rapped off "Kung-Fu Fighting" and gave the thread it's name.

I told the mods not to make LG a Mod. "Don't put that burden on him, you'll kill the funny" I said. But you can't tell Mods anything.

The Liberal and Conservative Zones were an April Fool's joke by the mods. Once everyone started posting in both the joke was worn out and somehow they merged the forums again. But I wonder if the joke inspired the LWDT and RWDT's?

It's also when we discovered Reppy had a sister, who had a post count permanently set at 0, something I was very jealous of.

The only reason her post count was forever 0 is because she only ever posted in F7 where posts don't get added to your post count, no fancy mod trickery involved.

[MC United]

has anyone ignored the creation of F7?

Speaking of F7, the closure of Mama Nana's Bistro was a significant (and sad) event.

[Western Fardelshufflestein]

It's also when we discovered Reppy had a sister, who had a post count permanently set at 0, something I was very jealous of.

The only reason her post count was forever 0 is because she only ever posted in F7 where posts don't get added to your post count, no fancy mod trickery involved.

THEN HOW DO I STILL HAVE TONS OF--actually, never mind.

[Luziyca]

has anyone ignored the creation of F7?

Speaking of F7, the closure of Mama Nana's Bistro was a significant (and sad) event.

Now that is a name I have not heard in years. I think it got closed with the first moratorium.

[Greater Cesnica]

There are a few things that stand out to me.

1. A mod goes crazy and deletes a bunch of nations because George W. Bush was re-elected (2004)
2. The forums are moved from jolt (2009)
3. Karinzistan tries to incite a "revolution" against the mods and threatens to hack the site. He becomes DoS. (2012)
4. A user named 1,000 Cats starts a region to promote zoophilia and openly talks about how he rapes his cat. He becomes DoS. (2012)
5. A bunch of neo-nazis and fundamentalist Christians swarm the forums in an unusually intense NS summer. (2012)
6. Several forum members team up get Hippostania deated (2013)
7. The megathreads are introduced, marking the decline of NSG. (2015)
8. A mod named Dread Lady Narthica is fired from the mod force and is later deated. (2015 or 2016)
9. About three dozen users are kicked off the site after the mods discovered that they were engaged in sexual RPing using the telegram feature. Some of these users were underage, prompting the mods to get the police involved. (2016)
10. A pair of radical Islamists try to spread their crazy/hateful ideology on the forum with El-Amin advocating slavery, "Islamic rape", killing LGBT people, and voicing his support of various terrorist groups. (2019)
11: A bored middle school kid, often referred to as the Banana Kid, relentlessly spams the forums using various banana themed accounts, annoying the mods and amusing everyone else. He last appeared in June with a farewell post and hasn't come back since.(2019-2020)

Sauce/more information on #1?

[Valentine Z]

has anyone ignored the creation of F7?

I wasn't there, but the splitting of P2TM and F7 would be pretty significant.

On a side note, it makes me a little sad that most people thought of F7 as nothing but a spammy community, or littered with spam.

I mean... technically most of them are harmless one-word games, but I can vouch and promote that we do (or used to) have a very active community of worldbuilders. Most of them have defaulted to Discord most of the time, but most of the old guards and the new blood are still around for a good time. ♥

Sauce/more information on #1?

Stephi resigned becasue she was too busy, not for any wrong doing, at least as far as I know.

And, at least as I recall, Myrth wasn't forced to resign but did so voluntarily.

Stephistan was dishonorably discharged not too long after the 2004 US Presidential election. There's probably some old threads buried deep in the old forum about it (that's all I found on a very casual search, I think a lot of the "juicy" stuff was shuffled out of sight and is now inaccessible,) but long story short, she had always been very outspoken about her political beliefs, and she flipped out not too long after Bush won the election, causing havoc throughout the forums. The manner of her behavior was such that giving her the option to "retire from moderation with dignity" was not available. She later ended up borderline DOS after the fact. To my knowledge, she hasn't been back since then.

Myrth's retirement was tangentially related, however when given the option to retire gracefully, if memory serves he took it. His nation is still around, though I haven't run across him on the forums. Neut had also gotten to a point where he was asked to step down, and while unhappy about it, he also retired with dignity- his nation has been inactive for over a year now. Other than those, when mods have retired, it was their own decision, usually due to losing interest in the game or real life obligations (The SLAGLands for instance, is preoccupied with a career and a kid these days.)

When a moderator's behavior becomes too much at odds with their duties, internal corrections are attempted first: talk problems out, that sort of thing. If that's still not enough, it's suggested that perhaps the moderator in question should consider stepping down. If the problem persists or worsens, they're pretty much given the ultimatum- they can retire with dignity and avoid losing face; or they will be forced to step down. In the more than 7 years I've been here, Stephistan was the only moderator retirement that went the sour route. We've never had a mod completely flip out and go deleting people willy-nilly (flagrant abuse of power,) but she came close. It's regrettable, but considering that our mods are all volunteers from among the playerbase, that we've only had once such case is a pretty good track record.

[Bombadil]

It's also when we discovered Reppy had a sister, who had a post count permanently set at 0, something I was very jealous of.

The only reason her post count was forever 0 is because she only ever posted in F7 where posts don't get added to your post count, no fancy mod trickery involved.

hmm.. I still suspect flagrant nepotism..

Other than that..

1. The Mod Olympics - I enjoyed those, where did they go
2. Reploid Seductions - dairies from the Mod from Hell - also dropped off the radar

[Goobergunchia]

Near 17 years ago, a group of Generalites known as the Incompetent Army successfully counter-raided the region of LUE. I believe it was NSG's first (and maybe last) 'official' foray into raiding.

That was hilarious. Led by Spoffin and Tactical Grace, per Qaaolchoura's post here. I miss all of them.

vomit porn? never heard of that. don't bully.
god, I do not want to have been created in 2003.

It was gross, just leave it at that.
2003 is the best time, not that moldy 2002.

Fun fact: In those days there were three words filtered on the forums and a certain shock site was one of them. And then the site switched URLs and "goat" got added to the filter.

Since somebody asked, although it's been said before: New Zealand is not currently banned, but that's because (1) the Michael Jackson spammer was finally dealt with IRL and (2) Max convinced the ISP in question to redo their IP allocation in a less dynamic/proxytastic fashion.

has anyone ignored the creation of F7?

I think it always existed since this forum got created.

But yeah, the split of P2TM and F7 was pretty significant.

So this is not true. General has been around since ... longer than I have. Back in the old forums some people noticed that the "f=7" URL was skipped in the visible forum URL pages (the equivalent of viewforum.php?f=7). This led to lots of jokes about Forum 7 being the sekret mod forum and center of all NationStates conspiracies. (Did we ever find out who was behind The Smoking Man?) Ultimately this culminated in an actual Forum 7 being created as a temporary joke for a brief period of time (I think an April Fool Day, although I could be wrong about that). All of this was before the move to Jolt.

Post-Jolt F7 was recreated as a social hangout, splitting from General. I don't remember the details but it was very shortly after these forums were created. Really, the move off of Jolt can't be understated in importance -- having people who actually cared about NationStates regain full control over the forums was huge. The Jolt forums were very much "you are a subforum in a much wider system" and they were horrendously stagnant. And ugly.

Another fun thing that happened on the old forums (2004 sometime) was when, as a desperate disk-saving maneuver, admin activated a post-pruning script without giving anybody advance warning, resulting in a bunch of old threads that people still wanted to reference disappearing overnight and everybody desperately trying to find and bump the ones that were still around until an Archive forum was created. (General's post cap on threads, which was implemented before I regularly read this forum, was another attempt to save the server -- the original Eternal Thread was just that until the post cap was announced.)

[Greater Cesnica]

I wasn't there, but the splitting of P2TM and F7 would be pretty significant.

On a side note, it makes me a little sad that most people thought of F7 as nothing but a spammy community, or littered with spam.

I mean... technically most of them are harmless one-word games, but I can vouch and promote that we do (or used to) have a very active community of worldbuilders. Most of them have defaulted to Discord most of the time, but most of the old guards and the new blood are still around for a good time. ♥

Sauce/more information on #1?

Stephistan was dishonorably discharged not too long after the 2004 US Presidential election. There's probably some old threads buried deep in the old forum about it (that's all I found on a very casual search, I think a lot of the "juicy" stuff was shuffled out of sight and is now inaccessible,) but long story short, she had always been very outspoken about her political beliefs, and she flipped out not too long after Bush won the election, causing havoc throughout the forums. The manner of her behavior was such that giving her the option to "retire from moderation with dignity" was not available. She later ended up borderline DOS after the fact. To my knowledge, she hasn't been back since then.

Myrth's retirement was tangentially related, however when given the option to retire gracefully, if memory serves he took it. His nation is still around, though I haven't run across him on the forums. Neut had also gotten to a point where he was asked to step down, and while unhappy about it, he also retired with dignity- his nation has been inactive for over a year now. Other than those, when mods have retired, it was their own decision, usually due to losing interest in the game or real life obligations (The SLAGLands for instance, is preoccupied with a career and a kid these days.)

When a moderator's behavior becomes too much at odds with their duties, internal corrections are attempted first: talk problems out, that sort of thing. If that's still not enough, it's suggested that perhaps the moderator in question should consider stepping down. If the problem persists or worsens, they're pretty much given the ultimatum- they can retire with dignity and avoid losing face; or they will be forced to step down. In the more than 7 years I've been here, Stephistan was the only moderator retirement that went the sour route. We've never had a mod completely flip out and go deleting people willy-nilly (flagrant abuse of power,) but she came close. It's regrettable, but considering that our mods are all volunteers from among the playerbase, that we've only had once such case is a pretty good track record.

Oooh, tea. Thank you!

[Bombadil]

Near 17 years ago, a group of Generalites known as the Incompetent Army successfully counter-raided the region of LUE. I believe it was NSG's first (and maybe last) 'official' foray into raiding.

That was hilarious. Led by Spoffin and Tactical Grace, per Qaaolchoura's post here. I miss all of them.

It was gross, just leave it at that.
2003 is the best time, not that moldy 2002.

Fun fact: In those days there were three words filtered on the forums and a certain shock site was one of them. And then the site switched URLs and "goat" got added to the filter.

Since somebody asked, although it's been said before: New Zealand is not currently banned, but that's because (1) the Michael Jackson spammer was finally dealt with IRL and (2) Max convinced the ISP in question to redo their IP allocation in a less dynamic/proxytastic fashion.

I think it always existed since this forum got created.

But yeah, the split of P2TM and F7 was pretty significant.

So this is not true. General has been around since ... longer than I have. Back in the old forums some people noticed that the "f=7" URL was skipped in the visible forum URL pages (the equivalent of viewforum.php?f=7). This led to lots of jokes about Forum 7 being the sekret mod forum and center of all NationStates conspiracies. (Did we ever find out who was behind The Smoking Man?) Ultimately this culminated in an actual Forum 7 being created as a temporary joke for a brief period of time (I think an April Fool Day, although I could be wrong about that). All of this was before the move to Jolt.

Post-Jolt F7 was recreated as a social hangout, splitting from General. I don't remember the details but it was very shortly after these forums were created. Really, the move off of Jolt can't be understated in importance -- having people who actually cared about NationStates regain full control over the forums was huge. The Jolt forums were very much "you are a subforum in a much wider system" and they were horrendously stagnant. And ugly.

Another fun thing that happened on the old forums (2004 sometime) was when, as a desperate disk-saving maneuver, admin activated a post-pruning script without giving anybody advance warning, resulting in a bunch of old threads that people still wanted to reference disappearing overnight and everybody desperately trying to find and bump the ones that were still around until an Archive forum was created. (General's post cap on threads, which was implemented before I regularly read this forum, was another attempt to save the server -- the original Eternal Thread was just that until the post cap was announced.)

F7 was created off some Moderator dispute, sort of around UMP time, where it was decided more chatty threads had no place in General and so F7 was created for those. Alas, for me at least, it never became a chatty social place exactly, not in the way the original NSG was where there were actual meet-ups.

I didn't mind Jolt though I fully support why NS moved, but I didn't mind it as a forum, you had the occasional fun time jumps, you could scroll all the way back in the thread when quoting.. quote pyramids.. it had a few features I liked, on polls you could see who actually voted..