Dawnwing's Memories
Jul 31, 2016 1:48:53 GMT -5
*Faith*, Darkshine Laufeyson-Barnes, and 3 more like this
Post by Dawnwing on Jul 31, 2016 1:48:53 GMT -5
So, seven years on the forum = a lot of memories! I'll put just about anything I can think of here.
The First Day: Discovering the Forum
July 13, 2009. At this point in the series we had just gotten Code of the Clans and the third Tigerstar and Sasha manga in June, we were gonna get Bluestar's Prophecy in a couple weeks, and everyone was super excited for it. The fourth series was set to be released later that fall. I had just turned 17 and was in the summer before my senior year of high school, and part of my daily routine was to check a variety of Warriors sites. Warrior's Wish and Wands and Worlds, the official site, Amazon, etc. I think we fans did kind of suspect a forum launch at that point - something on HarperCollins Catalogs maybe, or else I think we might've seen something in a Bluestar's Prophecy Browse Inside that hinted at it, I don't remember. But anyway during my daily site check, warriorcats.com had a little star in the corner of the screen that day, something about message boards, so I clicked it and registered immediately.
I gave the news to Warrior's Wish, which was the Warriors forum at the time - most active, very well acknowledged by the Erins, first to find news, etc - and pandemonium broke out. We were concerned that it would steal away the spotlight and potential new users of Warrior's Wish (and justifiably so, since that's what happened). The forum was not looked upon well - the ugly color scheme, the strict rules, and the post-approval. God, the post-approval. I said it on Warrior's Wish just an hour after joining the new one: "I'm sure that they'll change that before long because they'll just be flooded." I'm just surprised it took so long.
Basically the Warriors Wishians proceeded to troll the site for a while, trying to see what they could slip through the post-approval and so forth, and making fun of threads on there. Not our proudest moment, and our mods had to put a stop to it, but it was fun while it lasted.
The Early Days/Years
The sections themselves
- Introductions section didn't exist. This was one of the first sections that they added after the forum's launch.
- For the Warriors sections, "Warriors: The Original Series" section was simply titled "Warriors" at first. People kept getting it mixed up with Warriors Misc, not realizing that it was meant to be for the first series and not just random Warriors stuff, so eventually they added the "The Original Series" to it. "Dawn of the Clans" obviously didn't exist till those books came along.
- In "The Cats and The Clans", only the sections "The Cats" and "The Clans" were around at the start. "Warriors FanClans" and "Warriors Fanfiction" were some of the first sections added (along with Seekers FanClans and Fanfiction, and Introductions might've been in that batch too.) Before they were added, people used The Clans for RPing. I can't remember for sure where people put fanfiction, but it was probably in Warriors Misc or OTD. I remember a couple slipping into the main-series sections every few days though.
- All Seekers had was the first three books (the only ones out at that point), The Bears, and Seekers Misc. (That's why it has a section for each book now: rather than just making a "first series" and "second series" section, they just added each book as it came out.) Seekers FanClans and Seekers Fanfiction were added when the Warriors FanClans and Fanfiction sections were added.
- Survivors didn't exist 'cause that wasn't out for a few years. It was added in early 2012 after the "official" announcement of the series (we first caught wind of a new Erin series in summer 2011, and knew the animal a while before the reveal thanks to a HarperCollins Catalogs image of a bookstore stand that said "The time has come for dogs to rule the wild").
- "Ask Erin" originally just had "Questions for Erin", not "Answers From Erin". It was open to member replies for the first half year the forums existed.
- The "Other Topics" section used to be only Off Topic Discussion. Both the Art Forum and Off Topic RP didn't exist, and were born of massive need. More on that later.
- Warriors Adventure Game was added in like August or September 2009, because that's when they released the practice mission and rules. The first real mission was in the back of The Fourth Apprentice later that year.
- Fanatic Challenge wasn't there at the start of the forum, but it was added in mid-2009, briefly before the Challenge started. The "Winners" section was added after the first question, and it was used so that back when Warriorcats.com had the scrolling text across the top of the screen, it would pull that text from the titles of the threads in the Winners section.
- Anniversary section was added in 2010 at the first anniversary, obviously.
- A "Questions for Game Admin" subforum was added in early 2010, and eventually deleted. Will explain that one later.
- 10 Years of Warriors wasn't added until Dec 2012 or Jan 2013.
- Book Club wasn't added until 2013
- Wild Games wasn't added until Feb 2014
The Users and Topics
The majority of users were age 13 and under. And they were really noobish. In-depth conversations were not a thing. I remember one of the earliest threads on Day 1 was just "I like ninjas" as the opening post. Not to be funny or an ironic troll; they were 100% serious. Same with threads like "ShadowClan is so mean" and so forth, and you couldn't make any single criticism of the books without being hit with a ton of "if you don't like them, then don't read them!" comments. You also couldn't say anything bad about Firestar. I was actually pretty snarky on the forum in its early days, especially to those sorts of threads/comments/whatever.
Once post approval was removed, page-stretching posts were common, and so were flame wars. People frequently have complained over the years that "the forums aren't like how they used to be because people are fighting so much now." Such people were not around during the forum's early days/years. You know those big fights where a thread grows quickly by pages and pages and multiple people get banned and then everyone's talking about it later on? Those were basically a daily occurrence.
Mods were a lot less strict on outside links; basically the accepted rule for a while was that you couldn't literally link to it, but you could put spaces in, or else tell people how to get there.
Fun fact: religion and politics and so forth used to be allowed, but members proved time and time again that they couldn't handle such topics maturely, and eventually they got banned.
Snail Posting
For about the first three months the forums existed, moderators had to approve every. Single. Post. As you can imagine, this was a very slow process. On the first days of the forum, it took only a few hours (until the mods went to bed and no more posts appeared for the night, that is), and toward the end it would take more than a week - and posts wouldn't always appear in the order they were submitted either (sometimes a post made on Monday wouldn't show up until Saturday, but a post made on Wednesday would show up on Thursday). Sometimes perfectly legitimate posts didn't show up at all. As you can imagine, this made RPing virtually impossible: someone would make a post, a few people would reply each taking it a slightly different way, some of those posts would show up, people would try to reply to those and keep a consistent story, then some of the missing posts would finally show up, etc.
As I said above, I said within the first hour or so on day 1 that there was no way that they'd be able to keep that system, and I'm seriously surprised that it took so long for them to remove it.
There was one good thing about snail posting, though: no flame wars.
Questions for Erin
This was my main section when the forums opened. Most of the questions had already been asked to or answered by the Erins, so it was easy to tell the user where they'd answered it before and quote the answer to them. It got to the point where were actually several threads where people were asking or theorizing that I was actually an Erin that was using a personal account, lol: I had to set them straight. But anyway, having fans answer the questions went well. People were happy with some response (especially if it was a previously-asked question where I could quote the answer), even if it wasn't the authors directly.
Then about six months after the forums opened, they turned off replying for normal users. Their reason, when asked, was "It's supposed to be for Erin to answer". As you can imagine, I protested that fiercely, and for several years (even at one point doing the math on how many questions had been asked and how many had been answered: it came out to less than a thousandth of a percent), but to no avail. About a year later was when they finally actually used it for "Erin" to answer about 15 questions, and that's when they added the "Answers from Erin" section. She made two more visits to the forum after: once to answer about 15 more in one topic like that, and once just floating around replying to random threads in Ask Erin (around 100 of them).
That time the Erin account got hacked
You might have read about this on the TV Tropes page - this was sometime in October or November 2009, after post approval was removed and before The Fourth Apprentice's release. The book was not yet out, but the Erins had told us that the plot would involve beavers. Someone hacked (or cracked, technically; probably guessed the password) the official ErinHunter account and started posting all kinds of crazy spoilers: the most memorable one was that Firestar would get killed (as in lose all his remaining lives) by beavers. There was something about Leopardstar too if I'm remembering correctly. Several of us were laughing about it and passing around the popcorn, but a lot of people believed it since it was, after all, the official account.
The first Fanatic Challenge
I remember this; it was fun. I was one of the winners on the first week, and I proudly had my name scrolling across the top of Warriorcats.com for a while. Of course, people found a sneaky little way to cheat: originally when you edited a post within a minute of posting it, it didn't have the little "edited by xxx at xx:00" message on the bottom of your post. So after the second week or so, people started making a post as soon as possible, just with a random letter or something equally pointless, to try and be one of the first 10. They'd wait to see others post the answer, then edit their post and put the answer in it before the minute was up. People who saw it would point out "hey, they cheated!", but there was no proof since there was no edit message if it was edited within the first minute. So they changed it so that ALL edited posts had that message regardless of how fast the edit was made, and would disqualify anyone who had an edit note on their post.
Technical Stuff
There were no signatures for something like the first year of the forum. And even then they were "plain text" only, no colors or whatever. People also of course abused this and would make their signatures ridiculously long, and so that's why the "signatures must be four lines" rule began.
Yeah, technical problems are one thing that people forget about the old forum. Frequent downtimes, occasionally posts getting lost, or not showing up. There's a reason that the "forums are powered by hamsters running on wheels" joke got started.
Also, the way the old forum worked was that it used "static" pages: a page would only update when it was posted on. So whatever your signature was when you posted it, would remain there until the next person posted. People would try to show that they were online by putting it in their signature, but of course that didn't work because yeah, they were online when they posted a post, but if nobody responded afterward, it would never update when they next went offline and updated their sig to say that they were offline. Eventually they changed it to make the pages all "live".
Joe S - Moderator
Ah, the infamous Joe S. He was only a moderator for a short time, but he certainly made an impression. He was quite honestly the best mod that the forums ever had.
He was no-nonsense and didn't put up with any garbage. By this, I mean that he was incredibly blunt with rulebreakers, and he didn't have any patience for it - at one point making a post in all caps and typing "ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!", which we at Warrior's Wish were pretty amused by. I don't blame him, though, he had a lot of hate directed at him at the time. (One of my favorite posts in the "Warriors Forum is NOT an Art Gallery" thread is one user saying to another, "Dude. You just drew a picture of Joe S. being eaten by a dog. You really aren't in a position to be calling anyone 'rude'. ")
Anyway, as you can imagine, his rough manner caused a lot of people to dislike him, calling him "mean". That tended to be the rule-breakers, mainly. There was even one instance where he said "stop fighting or heads will roll", and someone made a petition in F&S complaining about how it was a "death threat" and that he should be fired, or at least made to publicly apologize. He neatly locked the thread with:
People tend to forget the good parts, though. The boards were a lot cleaner during his time here. He didn't just delete threads; he'd give warnings first, unlike every other mod around. He took a very very firm stance against bullying and had zero tolerance for it. And he interacted with the users in normal posts more than any other moderator on the forums, just chatting with people in OTD frequently. He liked Dr. Who, I remember, and pink lemonade - those became his signature things - and he posted a picture he took that he called Rooftop Cat that became a bit of a meme on the forum. He actually was a pretty popular mod; it's just that his bluntness made a stronger impression over the years, and long after he was gone, his only remaining posts on the site were from the stickied "Warriors Manga is NOT an Art Forum" thread where tensions were running highest.
And then one day he made a goodbye post:
When people pressed for details, he simply said "it wasn't my choice", and the thread was deleted pretty quickly. Rumors flew that he was fired, especially considering the "Heads Will Roll" anti-Joe petition, and JanaM later posted staying that no, he was not fired, he just got a new job. (Due to what he said, and what JanaM said, I'm guessing he was reassigned to one of the many other sites that Metaverse Mod Squad provides services to.)
More to come later!
The First Day: Discovering the Forum
July 13, 2009. At this point in the series we had just gotten Code of the Clans and the third Tigerstar and Sasha manga in June, we were gonna get Bluestar's Prophecy in a couple weeks, and everyone was super excited for it. The fourth series was set to be released later that fall. I had just turned 17 and was in the summer before my senior year of high school, and part of my daily routine was to check a variety of Warriors sites. Warrior's Wish and Wands and Worlds, the official site, Amazon, etc. I think we fans did kind of suspect a forum launch at that point - something on HarperCollins Catalogs maybe, or else I think we might've seen something in a Bluestar's Prophecy Browse Inside that hinted at it, I don't remember. But anyway during my daily site check, warriorcats.com had a little star in the corner of the screen that day, something about message boards, so I clicked it and registered immediately.
I gave the news to Warrior's Wish, which was the Warriors forum at the time - most active, very well acknowledged by the Erins, first to find news, etc - and pandemonium broke out. We were concerned that it would steal away the spotlight and potential new users of Warrior's Wish (and justifiably so, since that's what happened). The forum was not looked upon well - the ugly color scheme, the strict rules, and the post-approval. God, the post-approval. I said it on Warrior's Wish just an hour after joining the new one: "I'm sure that they'll change that before long because they'll just be flooded." I'm just surprised it took so long.
Basically the Warriors Wishians proceeded to troll the site for a while, trying to see what they could slip through the post-approval and so forth, and making fun of threads on there. Not our proudest moment, and our mods had to put a stop to it, but it was fun while it lasted.
The Early Days/Years
The sections themselves
- Introductions section didn't exist. This was one of the first sections that they added after the forum's launch.
- For the Warriors sections, "Warriors: The Original Series" section was simply titled "Warriors" at first. People kept getting it mixed up with Warriors Misc, not realizing that it was meant to be for the first series and not just random Warriors stuff, so eventually they added the "The Original Series" to it. "Dawn of the Clans" obviously didn't exist till those books came along.
- In "The Cats and The Clans", only the sections "The Cats" and "The Clans" were around at the start. "Warriors FanClans" and "Warriors Fanfiction" were some of the first sections added (along with Seekers FanClans and Fanfiction, and Introductions might've been in that batch too.) Before they were added, people used The Clans for RPing. I can't remember for sure where people put fanfiction, but it was probably in Warriors Misc or OTD. I remember a couple slipping into the main-series sections every few days though.
- All Seekers had was the first three books (the only ones out at that point), The Bears, and Seekers Misc. (That's why it has a section for each book now: rather than just making a "first series" and "second series" section, they just added each book as it came out.) Seekers FanClans and Seekers Fanfiction were added when the Warriors FanClans and Fanfiction sections were added.
- Survivors didn't exist 'cause that wasn't out for a few years. It was added in early 2012 after the "official" announcement of the series (we first caught wind of a new Erin series in summer 2011, and knew the animal a while before the reveal thanks to a HarperCollins Catalogs image of a bookstore stand that said "The time has come for dogs to rule the wild").
- "Ask Erin" originally just had "Questions for Erin", not "Answers From Erin". It was open to member replies for the first half year the forums existed.
- The "Other Topics" section used to be only Off Topic Discussion. Both the Art Forum and Off Topic RP didn't exist, and were born of massive need. More on that later.
- Warriors Adventure Game was added in like August or September 2009, because that's when they released the practice mission and rules. The first real mission was in the back of The Fourth Apprentice later that year.
- Fanatic Challenge wasn't there at the start of the forum, but it was added in mid-2009, briefly before the Challenge started. The "Winners" section was added after the first question, and it was used so that back when Warriorcats.com had the scrolling text across the top of the screen, it would pull that text from the titles of the threads in the Winners section.
- Anniversary section was added in 2010 at the first anniversary, obviously.
- A "Questions for Game Admin" subforum was added in early 2010, and eventually deleted. Will explain that one later.
- 10 Years of Warriors wasn't added until Dec 2012 or Jan 2013.
- Book Club wasn't added until 2013
- Wild Games wasn't added until Feb 2014
The Users and Topics
The majority of users were age 13 and under. And they were really noobish. In-depth conversations were not a thing. I remember one of the earliest threads on Day 1 was just "I like ninjas" as the opening post. Not to be funny or an ironic troll; they were 100% serious. Same with threads like "ShadowClan is so mean" and so forth, and you couldn't make any single criticism of the books without being hit with a ton of "if you don't like them, then don't read them!" comments. You also couldn't say anything bad about Firestar. I was actually pretty snarky on the forum in its early days, especially to those sorts of threads/comments/whatever.
Once post approval was removed, page-stretching posts were common, and so were flame wars. People frequently have complained over the years that "the forums aren't like how they used to be because people are fighting so much now." Such people were not around during the forum's early days/years. You know those big fights where a thread grows quickly by pages and pages and multiple people get banned and then everyone's talking about it later on? Those were basically a daily occurrence.
Mods were a lot less strict on outside links; basically the accepted rule for a while was that you couldn't literally link to it, but you could put spaces in, or else tell people how to get there.
Fun fact: religion and politics and so forth used to be allowed, but members proved time and time again that they couldn't handle such topics maturely, and eventually they got banned.
Snail Posting
For about the first three months the forums existed, moderators had to approve every. Single. Post. As you can imagine, this was a very slow process. On the first days of the forum, it took only a few hours (until the mods went to bed and no more posts appeared for the night, that is), and toward the end it would take more than a week - and posts wouldn't always appear in the order they were submitted either (sometimes a post made on Monday wouldn't show up until Saturday, but a post made on Wednesday would show up on Thursday). Sometimes perfectly legitimate posts didn't show up at all. As you can imagine, this made RPing virtually impossible: someone would make a post, a few people would reply each taking it a slightly different way, some of those posts would show up, people would try to reply to those and keep a consistent story, then some of the missing posts would finally show up, etc.
As I said above, I said within the first hour or so on day 1 that there was no way that they'd be able to keep that system, and I'm seriously surprised that it took so long for them to remove it.
There was one good thing about snail posting, though: no flame wars.
Questions for Erin
This was my main section when the forums opened. Most of the questions had already been asked to or answered by the Erins, so it was easy to tell the user where they'd answered it before and quote the answer to them. It got to the point where were actually several threads where people were asking or theorizing that I was actually an Erin that was using a personal account, lol: I had to set them straight. But anyway, having fans answer the questions went well. People were happy with some response (especially if it was a previously-asked question where I could quote the answer), even if it wasn't the authors directly.
Then about six months after the forums opened, they turned off replying for normal users. Their reason, when asked, was "It's supposed to be for Erin to answer". As you can imagine, I protested that fiercely, and for several years (even at one point doing the math on how many questions had been asked and how many had been answered: it came out to less than a thousandth of a percent), but to no avail. About a year later was when they finally actually used it for "Erin" to answer about 15 questions, and that's when they added the "Answers from Erin" section. She made two more visits to the forum after: once to answer about 15 more in one topic like that, and once just floating around replying to random threads in Ask Erin (around 100 of them).
That time the Erin account got hacked
You might have read about this on the TV Tropes page - this was sometime in October or November 2009, after post approval was removed and before The Fourth Apprentice's release. The book was not yet out, but the Erins had told us that the plot would involve beavers. Someone hacked (or cracked, technically; probably guessed the password) the official ErinHunter account and started posting all kinds of crazy spoilers: the most memorable one was that Firestar would get killed (as in lose all his remaining lives) by beavers. There was something about Leopardstar too if I'm remembering correctly. Several of us were laughing about it and passing around the popcorn, but a lot of people believed it since it was, after all, the official account.
The first Fanatic Challenge
I remember this; it was fun. I was one of the winners on the first week, and I proudly had my name scrolling across the top of Warriorcats.com for a while. Of course, people found a sneaky little way to cheat: originally when you edited a post within a minute of posting it, it didn't have the little "edited by xxx at xx:00" message on the bottom of your post. So after the second week or so, people started making a post as soon as possible, just with a random letter or something equally pointless, to try and be one of the first 10. They'd wait to see others post the answer, then edit their post and put the answer in it before the minute was up. People who saw it would point out "hey, they cheated!", but there was no proof since there was no edit message if it was edited within the first minute. So they changed it so that ALL edited posts had that message regardless of how fast the edit was made, and would disqualify anyone who had an edit note on their post.
Technical Stuff
There were no signatures for something like the first year of the forum. And even then they were "plain text" only, no colors or whatever. People also of course abused this and would make their signatures ridiculously long, and so that's why the "signatures must be four lines" rule began.
Yeah, technical problems are one thing that people forget about the old forum. Frequent downtimes, occasionally posts getting lost, or not showing up. There's a reason that the "forums are powered by hamsters running on wheels" joke got started.
Also, the way the old forum worked was that it used "static" pages: a page would only update when it was posted on. So whatever your signature was when you posted it, would remain there until the next person posted. People would try to show that they were online by putting it in their signature, but of course that didn't work because yeah, they were online when they posted a post, but if nobody responded afterward, it would never update when they next went offline and updated their sig to say that they were offline. Eventually they changed it to make the pages all "live".
Joe S - Moderator
Ah, the infamous Joe S. He was only a moderator for a short time, but he certainly made an impression. He was quite honestly the best mod that the forums ever had.
He was no-nonsense and didn't put up with any garbage. By this, I mean that he was incredibly blunt with rulebreakers, and he didn't have any patience for it - at one point making a post in all caps and typing "ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!", which we at Warrior's Wish were pretty amused by. I don't blame him, though, he had a lot of hate directed at him at the time. (One of my favorite posts in the "Warriors Forum is NOT an Art Gallery" thread is one user saying to another, "Dude. You just drew a picture of Joe S. being eaten by a dog. You really aren't in a position to be calling anyone 'rude'. ")
Anyway, as you can imagine, his rough manner caused a lot of people to dislike him, calling him "mean". That tended to be the rule-breakers, mainly. There was even one instance where he said "stop fighting or heads will roll", and someone made a petition in F&S complaining about how it was a "death threat" and that he should be fired, or at least made to publicly apologize. He neatly locked the thread with:
Originally posted by Joe S - Moderator:
Death threat? Oh come on - you aren't serious, are you? It's a figure of speech, and QUITE a common one too.
It means knock it off of you're in trouble.
Death threat. hahahahahahaha.
Death threat? Oh come on - you aren't serious, are you? It's a figure of speech, and QUITE a common one too.
It means knock it off of you're in trouble.
Death threat. hahahahahahaha.
People tend to forget the good parts, though. The boards were a lot cleaner during his time here. He didn't just delete threads; he'd give warnings first, unlike every other mod around. He took a very very firm stance against bullying and had zero tolerance for it. And he interacted with the users in normal posts more than any other moderator on the forums, just chatting with people in OTD frequently. He liked Dr. Who, I remember, and pink lemonade - those became his signature things - and he posted a picture he took that he called Rooftop Cat that became a bit of a meme on the forum. He actually was a pretty popular mod; it's just that his bluntness made a stronger impression over the years, and long after he was gone, his only remaining posts on the site were from the stickied "Warriors Manga is NOT an Art Forum" thread where tensions were running highest.
And then one day he made a goodbye post:
Originally posted by Joe S - Moderator:
Effective today, I will no longer be moderating the forums here. Wanted to drop a line and say that you won't be seeing me around these parts anymore. My time with Social Strata & HC's W/C forums is over.
You'll just have to harrass Dave just a little bit more because I'm not here. Throw him brownies or something.
Time to go drink some pink lemonade and watch more Doctor Who.
Bye!
Effective today, I will no longer be moderating the forums here. Wanted to drop a line and say that you won't be seeing me around these parts anymore. My time with Social Strata & HC's W/C forums is over.
You'll just have to harrass Dave just a little bit more because I'm not here. Throw him brownies or something.
Time to go drink some pink lemonade and watch more Doctor Who.
Bye!
When people pressed for details, he simply said "it wasn't my choice", and the thread was deleted pretty quickly. Rumors flew that he was fired, especially considering the "Heads Will Roll" anti-Joe petition, and JanaM later posted staying that no, he was not fired, he just got a new job. (Due to what he said, and what JanaM said, I'm guessing he was reassigned to one of the many other sites that Metaverse Mod Squad provides services to.)
More to come later!