The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
Please vote in the Forum Structure Poll. Polling will close at 2PM EST on January 21, 2025.
Debate over whether to transfer old threads to the promised land rages, probably, which got me thinking about if there are any threads worth keeping. Any worth looking at again, at a later date; a mostly absurd idea, surely? If you’re not there at the time what good are they? So I thought about it and got two must haves off the top of my head:
Have you ever wanted to watch a person descend into madness? While drawing feet? Every day until a game gets a release date? This thread fulfils that very narrow need.
Which leads me to… What are your memorable threads? Links or not, if it’s so old you can’t find it right now. Jus’ chat about threads in this thread about threads,
So I'm trash at finding the old threads, but the ones that stood out to me:
The correct "Help Draw a Horse" thread. Not the other ones.
Forum battles, with the space-duck. Yeah that one.
Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff origin thread.
Speaking of watching people descend into madness, The CRWTH only webcomic thread. Plus the tribute art.
A while back I went and found all the old Bad Cosplay threads, probably the first threads I remember seeing on SE in the late 2000s and all the image links were dead
A while back I went and found all the old Bad Cosplay threads, probably the first threads I remember seeing on SE in the late 2000s and all the image links were dead
Yeah that’s sad. It’s part of why I’m thinking there’s not much use preserving the old threads from where they’re at now. A shame!
+1
miscellaneousinsanitygrass grows, birds fly, sun shines,and brother, i hurt peopleRegistered Userregular
So I'm trash at finding the old threads, but the ones that stood out to me:
The correct "Help Draw a Horse" thread. Not the other ones.
Forum battles, with the space-duck. Yeah that one.
Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff origin thread.
Speaking of watching people descend into madness, The CRWTH only webcomic thread. Plus the tribute art.
the real draw a horse threads are all locked up in the holiday forums
at least, I think... was the original just in SE or something? Maybe I'm just remembering the draw a reindeer threads
miscellaneousinsanitygrass grows, birds fly, sun shines,and brother, i hurt peopleRegistered Userregular
as far as LP threads go, besides the obvious answer of fishman's x-com playthrough, i quite enjoyed that one blind LP of dark souls where the guy stumbled into the most ass backwards path through the game imaginable and conquered it through sheer stubborn luck and pluck
+3
FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
Some I can no longer find, long lost to the cullings of old:
Shippy Ship the Awesome
This one was one of the fastest moving, shortest lived forum events that kinda spontaneously spun up in about 2002/3?
Someone started a thread called Shippy Ship the Awesome and invited everyone onboard to be pirate crew. Everyone piling into the thread took on a role on the 'ship' (thread) and we all post post posted about the pirate adventures we would be going on. Much rolicking and mirth and stupid in-character / fourth wall jokes were had.
Then we set off. I don't know which mod did it, but the thread was moved from SE++ to ... I want to say G&T? People just posting and refreshing in the thread (it was moving that fast) didn't even have time to adjust. Suddenly we were raiding other sub-forums! New crew were coming abord Shippy Ship saying 'WTF?' and we were capturing them as prisoners. Soon enough they would work out it was SE++ shenanigans, and after 15 minutes and few pages of this a mod turned up and said 'what's all this?' before sending us off... to Everything Else/D&D. We shipped through 3 other forums before returning to SE++, each one raided and pillaged as we stepped out, checked in on other subforum threads, picked up new random crew from far-away subforums.
It lasted about a single day, hit the moon (thread lock) in about 20 hours, but the weird little roleplaying inter-forum pirate raid was one of the weirdest, most unique spontaneous forum events I've ever been part of, an absolute chaotic mess that just spawned mostly out of a few bored, itinerant posters and a few mods willing to play along and see what chaos would spawn.
Do you shave your junk?
I want to say this thread was around 2005? I'm pretty sure I posted in it from Canada, so that would be about right.
On the surface, a fairly eye-rolling SE++ subject matter that in true 2005 fashion stayed on topic for about 6 pages and then devolved into true glory: over 20+ pages of @Druhim posting professional pics of tropical fish underwater, along with summary details of behaviour, habitat or sighting points of interest. Just, non-stop tropical fish. For 20+ pages. It was glorious.
Best part was it lasted weeks, but many had dipped out in the first few pages, and therefore had to be constantly be brought up to sped as to why the Shave Your Junk thread was regularly being referenced in other threads and why it kept getting bumped and posted in. It wasn't that we were all degenerates (I mean, we were, but that's not why it was bumping), it's that it became the secret tropical fish thread, and it had a misdirection on the door to keep unwary posters out. Legendary
LiteJedi's Monster of the Day
Not so much a single thread, but a long running daily series, where @LiteJedi would, every day, select a D&D monster and post a picture and summary, including discussion of how to make it interesting. This would often result in a few pages of discussion about said monster, reminisces about it's appearance and encounters in various posters campaigns of memory past. One of the more notable reasons for it's legend was simply the dedication of LiteJedi; showing a Brolo-like dedication to creating a new update to the series every single day; he went through all the popular, common entries in the Monster Manual. He went through dozens of rare beast from splat books and expansion material. He had a Spelljammer season and Planes creatures and a whole week of gem dragons. In my mind he kept it up for a couple years, literally hundreds of threads. Of all of them, but 2 remain: both created as throw back references to the series that was already over for years on the few times he came back to post another.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
+2
Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Kelets deserve to be remembered
0
Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
I find being hunted by Geth.... exhilarating. I don't understand why people don't like it. No one plays Half-life 1.5: frozen in limbo for 5 years. No, you play the hours of conflict; the desperate situation, the thrill of danger, the adrenaline pumping and the rushing sound of your ragged breathing and racing heartbeat filling your ears.
When every post is accompanied with the thrill of the chase, the looming terror of fear, that acid bile rising in your throat as you click 'Post Reply', not knowing whether it will come with deliverance or condemnation... well, going back to that benign, safe, comforting same old of posting just seems... boring.
Before long, you begin to miss the fear, miss that hard edge that comes with being pursued. You start trying to recreate the experience, skirting the line of defiance, making disparaging remarks about the coffee machine and stretching the glorious edict as far as you can without breaking it, hoping that the ever-watchful flashlight might be drawn to you. Not too much, just a little, just to get that quick hit to take the edge off.
This is where so many fail. Over time, the hits become not enough. You need bigger and more elaborate plays, more attention, a bigger rush. You start taunting the robot, playing chicken with the mods, getting the odd infraction to just get you through the day. Before long, you're doing temp bans to stop the shakes. Burn outs, flame wars, politics threads; none of it will suffice.
They say there are no old runners. You just can't keep going without succumbing to the need. The addiction. You huddle together in dark shadows, talking about those who couldn't stop, the ones you'll never be like, the Bagels, the K_As, the Wiggins, never looking at each other in eye for fear of looking into the mirror.
There are no old runners. Just those of us who haven't been caught yet.
To understand the context, it references a small period between late 2012 / early 2013 when @geth was set loose to hunt people, an event probably few remember and fewer still even got to experience first-hand.
For the unaware, in November 2012, something odd was noticed by myself, @#pipe, and @PiptheFair.
After hanging out on a thread page for a short while, we'd get a little popup in the usual vanilla notification spot (these days usually complaining Vanilla thread errors and such).
The little popup would say things like 'You get the sense you are being watched from the bushes' or 'You feel a set of eyes upon you'.
I'm not sure I can put into words how this kinda gets unsettling, particularly when you're like 'hey, is anyone else seeing these messages?' and most people are like 'No'.
It took a short while but slowly we found out we weren't the only ones seeing these messages and came together in a thread, where people noticed our posts had 2 extra reactions no one else had: one of 'Alert Authorities', and one of 'Help escape'.
People could react to our posts, and over time the messages changed to be more ominous - 'You hear footsteps behind you', and such. Spooky.
Thing was, you couldn't see other peoples reactions to your own post. You had no idea how people were voting for/against you. They were counted with you unaware of your own status.
Your peers and friends - were they reporting you? Or helping you flee?
Each time, if a person accumulated a sufficient number of Alert Authorities, geth would imprison you - jailing you with infraction for a period, and earning you the 'caught' badge.
Or, if enough people helped you, you would escape, and get the 'escapee' badge, and you could go about your business just fine.
I believe, in total, I only saw a half-dozen or so hunts. The initial one for the 3 of us, one related to I believe EPYC Jan 2013 on the handful of people yet to submit their entry on the slower team after the first team had finished... and the one I instigated when I posted this in the 'Secrets from the Mod Forum' thread.
So I ended up in 3 of them. I escaped all 3 times, but others got nabbed, and spent a few days jailed at the hands of their peers.
Particularly inconvenient when you get jailed and still need to turn in your EPYC creation.
But this one... this one I called out, literally within a day or so of just having escapeed my second hunt. It was a fun post full of hubris, and for my efforts, I got to go around one more time. A bit of silly fun.
Like I say, I don't think most people got to experience being the target at all, and with a downside of being jailed at the judgement of your peers, even in jest, I think some people wouldn't have found it as amusing. But damn if I didn't find that one of the more entertaining forum plug-ins @Icyliquid set up.
I remember getting hunted by geth! I can’t see my badgers on mobile (or I don’t know how), but I’m pretty I have the hunted! badger
I enjoyed the cryptid help and advice column threads we had for a while. That was just a fun RP moment for us all.
The Auspax threads (before offical auspax was thing) were some of my personal favs, but they don’t really have a lot of cache with anyone who wasn’t an Aussie, kiwi, or Wimble. There were too many fun and funny memories in those threads to pick any one thread, but possibly that time we (mostly Blake t) kept accusing #pipe of mildly annoying crimes was up there.
There was a bunch of just really funny moments, like “technically, that’s my LARP character” guy, or that dude who tried to flame out and called us all homps rather than homos.
Probably my personal fondest thread was that time I shaved and waxed my entire body to fundraise some cash for a poster whose wife was in hospital with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
edited November 2024
The best threads on the forums are the ones my boss in like 2004 called me into his office and had printed out to ask me what the fuck I was doing on this website on company time.
minor incident on
another member of the crowd goes down
+33
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
I had that talk with my supervisor as well one time. Though it started in a not great place because this was when subforum names would be displayed on the main one.
They also had a screenshot of the front forum page. And I had to explain what Strip Search actually was and not what they thought it was.
Posts
The correct "Help Draw a Horse" thread. Not the other ones.
Forum battles, with the space-duck. Yeah that one.
Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff origin thread.
Speaking of watching people descend into madness, The CRWTH only webcomic thread. Plus the tribute art.
Never saw this one. Choose your own adventure type thing?
Yeah that’s sad. It’s part of why I’m thinking there’s not much use preserving the old threads from where they’re at now. A shame!
it should be ported over but without any of the other corresponding threads to provide even a scrap of context for its existence
a webcomic, created purely in microsoft word
a wordcomic, as it were
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/42385/the-adventures-of-y-freelance-vowel/p1
My other personal favorite, which only had six words:
"is tidus gay?"
My opus
NSFW
[/spoiler
curious, the OP image is broken for me on desktop chrome but it shows up just fine on mobile and firefox
i'll use this as an excuse to post the rare limited edition holiday forums variant
Quite legendary in my opinion
Only thread that mattered
the real draw a horse threads are all locked up in the holiday forums
at least, I think... was the original just in SE or something? Maybe I'm just remembering the draw a reindeer threads
"my powerful nemesis lies dead for the last time"
thank you, crane operator was good
Shippy Ship the Awesome
This one was one of the fastest moving, shortest lived forum events that kinda spontaneously spun up in about 2002/3?
Someone started a thread called Shippy Ship the Awesome and invited everyone onboard to be pirate crew. Everyone piling into the thread took on a role on the 'ship' (thread) and we all post post posted about the pirate adventures we would be going on. Much rolicking and mirth and stupid in-character / fourth wall jokes were had.
Then we set off. I don't know which mod did it, but the thread was moved from SE++ to ... I want to say G&T? People just posting and refreshing in the thread (it was moving that fast) didn't even have time to adjust. Suddenly we were raiding other sub-forums! New crew were coming abord Shippy Ship saying 'WTF?' and we were capturing them as prisoners. Soon enough they would work out it was SE++ shenanigans, and after 15 minutes and few pages of this a mod turned up and said 'what's all this?' before sending us off... to Everything Else/D&D. We shipped through 3 other forums before returning to SE++, each one raided and pillaged as we stepped out, checked in on other subforum threads, picked up new random crew from far-away subforums.
It lasted about a single day, hit the moon (thread lock) in about 20 hours, but the weird little roleplaying inter-forum pirate raid was one of the weirdest, most unique spontaneous forum events I've ever been part of, an absolute chaotic mess that just spawned mostly out of a few bored, itinerant posters and a few mods willing to play along and see what chaos would spawn.
Do you shave your junk?
I want to say this thread was around 2005? I'm pretty sure I posted in it from Canada, so that would be about right.
On the surface, a fairly eye-rolling SE++ subject matter that in true 2005 fashion stayed on topic for about 6 pages and then devolved into true glory: over 20+ pages of @Druhim posting professional pics of tropical fish underwater, along with summary details of behaviour, habitat or sighting points of interest. Just, non-stop tropical fish. For 20+ pages. It was glorious.
Best part was it lasted weeks, but many had dipped out in the first few pages, and therefore had to be constantly be brought up to sped as to why the Shave Your Junk thread was regularly being referenced in other threads and why it kept getting bumped and posted in. It wasn't that we were all degenerates (I mean, we were, but that's not why it was bumping), it's that it became the secret tropical fish thread, and it had a misdirection on the door to keep unwary posters out. Legendary
LiteJedi's Monster of the Day
Not so much a single thread, but a long running daily series, where @LiteJedi would, every day, select a D&D monster and post a picture and summary, including discussion of how to make it interesting. This would often result in a few pages of discussion about said monster, reminisces about it's appearance and encounters in various posters campaigns of memory past. One of the more notable reasons for it's legend was simply the dedication of LiteJedi; showing a Brolo-like dedication to creating a new update to the series every single day; he went through all the popular, common entries in the Monster Manual. He went through dozens of rare beast from splat books and expansion material. He had a Spelljammer season and Planes creatures and a whole week of gem dragons. In my mind he kept it up for a couple years, literally hundreds of threads. Of all of them, but 2 remain: both created as throw back references to the series that was already over for years on the few times he came back to post another.
Worst Threads:
we all pulled together to eat infractions to help him escape
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/123799/oh-god-oh-god-oh-god/p1
To understand the context, it references a small period between late 2012 / early 2013 when @geth was set loose to hunt people, an event probably few remember and fewer still even got to experience first-hand.
For the unaware, in November 2012, something odd was noticed by myself, @#pipe, and @PiptheFair.
After hanging out on a thread page for a short while, we'd get a little popup in the usual vanilla notification spot (these days usually complaining Vanilla thread errors and such).
The little popup would say things like 'You get the sense you are being watched from the bushes' or 'You feel a set of eyes upon you'.
I'm not sure I can put into words how this kinda gets unsettling, particularly when you're like 'hey, is anyone else seeing these messages?' and most people are like 'No'.
It took a short while but slowly we found out we weren't the only ones seeing these messages and came together in a thread, where people noticed our posts had 2 extra reactions no one else had: one of 'Alert Authorities', and one of 'Help escape'.
People could react to our posts, and over time the messages changed to be more ominous - 'You hear footsteps behind you', and such. Spooky.
Thing was, you couldn't see other peoples reactions to your own post. You had no idea how people were voting for/against you. They were counted with you unaware of your own status.
Your peers and friends - were they reporting you? Or helping you flee?
Each time, if a person accumulated a sufficient number of Alert Authorities, geth would imprison you - jailing you with infraction for a period, and earning you the 'caught' badge.
Or, if enough people helped you, you would escape, and get the 'escapee' badge, and you could go about your business just fine.
I believe, in total, I only saw a half-dozen or so hunts. The initial one for the 3 of us, one related to I believe EPYC Jan 2013 on the handful of people yet to submit their entry on the slower team after the first team had finished... and the one I instigated when I posted this in the 'Secrets from the Mod Forum' thread.
So I ended up in 3 of them. I escaped all 3 times, but others got nabbed, and spent a few days jailed at the hands of their peers.
Particularly inconvenient when you get jailed and still need to turn in your EPYC creation.
But this one... this one I called out, literally within a day or so of just having escapeed my second hunt. It was a fun post full of hubris, and for my efforts, I got to go around one more time. A bit of silly fun.
Like I say, I don't think most people got to experience being the target at all, and with a downside of being jailed at the judgement of your peers, even in jest, I think some people wouldn't have found it as amusing. But damn if I didn't find that one of the more entertaining forum plug-ins @Icyliquid set up.
I enjoyed the cryptid help and advice column threads we had for a while. That was just a fun RP moment for us all.
The Auspax threads (before offical auspax was thing) were some of my personal favs, but they don’t really have a lot of cache with anyone who wasn’t an Aussie, kiwi, or Wimble. There were too many fun and funny memories in those threads to pick any one thread, but possibly that time we (mostly Blake t) kept accusing #pipe of mildly annoying crimes was up there.
There was a bunch of just really funny moments, like “technically, that’s my LARP character” guy, or that dude who tried to flame out and called us all homps rather than homos.
Probably my personal fondest thread was that time I shaved and waxed my entire body to fundraise some cash for a poster whose wife was in hospital with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
Completely forgotten about that
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/177281/chess-now/p1
They also had a screenshot of the front forum page. And I had to explain what Strip Search actually was and not what they thought it was.