Warrior Cat Forums History ~Putting it all Together

i can't speak much for the snail posting era because i wasn't around for it. as best i can tell, things were just more boring and simpler then. roleplaying was difficult because it could be anywhere between hours to a full day before your replies were submitted, so just trying to do one simple interaction/scene could take a week. it was especially frustrating on the more high-volume threads where you had ten to fifteen people trying to post at once and inadvertently contradicting one another. like if user A posted a prompt, user B could respond but user C wouldn't know because the response wasn't published yet, and then you end up with two different plots.

eventually the mods realized with the growth of the forums that that wasn't going to work long-term, so they changed to an instant posting model with report features instead. OTD and the art, survivors, and seekers boards didn't exist yet. after awhile the Manga forum (intended for discussing the graphical novels) was so bogged down by original art that they made the art forum. the new OTD operated for both conversation and non-warriors RPs until eventually the mods separated those, too. a fanfiction board was created because "The Cats" board (again meant for discussing the book characters) was overrun.

i guess it's worth mentioning that the old forums had several more boards that this site has condensed (mostly into this board). there was warriors misc[ellaneous] (mostly post games and non-clan Warrior RPs), The Cats, The Clans, and a board for each arc at the time (TOS, TNP, PO3, OOTS). there was way, WAY more traffic on the old forums at its peak so the separate boards was necessary.

2010-2013 was peak forums. FAQs was littered with several popular advice columns until the mods moved them to OTD (since the board was meant for questions about the boards). there were many very popular fanclans that dominated the top of the board: swiftclan, megaboneclan, savageclan, wolfclan (that was mine!), an "Original 5 Clans", more im forgetting. these would often do 20 pages a day and accumulated well over thousands of pages on their original threads. megaboneclan was particularly interesting as it started the "kit-stealing" trend which eventually got them deleted and its members banned multiple times. many copy-cat clans popped up and popularized various forms of "kit-____ing"; the most popular remained kit-stealing and it's rival kit-saving, but various bizarre versions like kit-styling, kit-washing, and kit-hugging. basically people would barge into random clans and steal, style, etc. their kits and leave. ("no kit-___ing" became a very common rule seen on clan pages). there was the OOTS wedding in which popular, frequent users on that board "married" their favorite characters. everyone was in the "rAnDoM XD" phase of the internet. the art forum was booming with many extensive and popular comics (several of which have been reposted in the current AF). "adoptables" were also popular, as were "shops" where people could make custom banner images for you. OOTS and OTD frequenters hated each other. many people used "post headers", which usually included a banner and fancy formatting with sections for chatting and rpings that they had to copy-and-paste manually into each post. using copy-and-paste generators for "fancy text" was a common way to decorate your threads--we only had BBC code and no html so we had to get creative.

five years in a row, the mods would host the "Wars Fanatic Challenge" for a few weeks out of the year. it had its own board. basically, they would announce the specific time they would post the next "Challenge Question" thread and the first ten to twenty people who answered correctly would win a prize. it was super competitive because a couple hundred people were all refreshing their pages at the same time waiting to answer. editing your answer post disqualified you. the prize: whatever avatar you had when you won had a special watermark added to it, and then they replaced your post rank with it. which meant you now had that AND a normal avatar. some people won multiple years in a row and had like three special avatars plus their normal one. someone in WCF memories compiled all these if you wanna know what they looked like.

in addition to fanclans, private "dens" were also common. essentially just chatrooms for a user and their friends. "forum mates" were also a big trend: some people treated it like an actual online relationship, others as a joke, or simply their favorite friend to RP being mates with. so there were a lot of "looking for a mate" threads in OTD and warriors misc. but there were loads more girls than guys so it got really nasty and competitive sometimes. as previously mentioned, warriors misc was mostly post games (like warrior name raters) or spammy threads to boost post count ("count to 1000").

at this era it was very common to have a line in your siggie "reserved" for mods to "sign it". usually variations on "[Mods please sign my siggie!]" and "[Mods, if you sign my siggie, you get a cookie]". most moderators would only sign siggies during the forum anniversary. WCM (Warrior Cats Moderator), Mary-Moderator, and Matthew-Moderator were the most generous. They would use their mod power to edit your siggie and replace the prompt with a messgage of theirs, such as "[*Noms cookie* - Mary-Mod]" or "[WCM was here!]". it was like a status symbol for a few years, especially if you had signatures of mods who had since resigned (like JanaM or JoeS).

Eve was a dinosaur server, though. The site suffered a lot of glitches. There was a time fondly referred to as the "Forum Apocalypse" in 2012 when for some reason nobody could post comments anywhere on the forums due to a bug. They could post threads, though, and fanclans and OTD got spammed with people using threads to have back-and-forth conversations for a few hours. There was also things like for some reason you couldn't post pictures in Warriors Misc. Stuff like that is why they eventually switched to Hoopla. It was unpopular at first-- the fanbase pretty much bullied the mods to change the color scheme to match the original Eve aesthetic. but with it we had stuff like HTML finally.

the mods could be ruthless. see, there was this whole issue where the mods kept having to come up with new rules in order to keep order, but they needed HarperCollins' permission to edit the official posted rules. and HC said...no, for some reason none of us could figure out. thus was the creation of the "Ghost Rules", which the mods couldn't post announcements about but still enforced. Icenose had a running thread in Feedback & Suggestions Board that listed all the known ghost rules. examples included: signatures can only be 4 lines; Hetalia, Zombie Apocalypses, and Hospital RPs were banned; specific age cannot be shared; discussing MegaBoneClan; no mention of religion. enforcement of these rules could be inconsistent. there was two instances of huge miscommunication between the moderation team: at one point, some mods were deleting any art that showed any trace of "blood", while others simultaneously insisted that was allowed; and another time when some mods kept removing any reference to characters dying in roleplays insisting it violated the no excessive violence rules while other mods were saying it was allowed. this went on for several days.

there were some famously popular chat threads in OTD and Misc. "WHAT THE WAFFLES" by cakeengland. the Writer's Guild. OTD Night Owlz. there really was a big ole culture to the forums. Warrior's World, an rp in which cats acted like humans where each member had their own "shops" and "houses" on separate threads, was very popular for a few years and sprung many copy cats.

they started dying out around 2014 imo. activity was on the decline, everyone transitioned from the "rAnDoM XD" personality to the constantly salty/edgy internet persona common at the time (still kinda is). a lot of previously popular roleplays and chat threads that had been going for years were becoming inactive. less people were interested in roleplaying overall so it was a lot harder to attract and then keep members. forums as an internet sensation were in general losing interest in favor of newer fandom social media on reddit, pintrest, tumblr, and chatrooms like discord and amino. so it wasn't a surprise to me when they finally closed down the forums for good.

i was reflecting on this briefly, and i'm pretty sure the reason RPs and stuff started dying out is because they lost their novelty. it was a common fate for a lot of the really big clans and chatrooms; when they're big and have a reputation, just joining them becomes a fad in itself, and even if people would only stick around for a few weeks that's plenty to maintain activity when new members were a revolving door. but after a while pretty much everyone had tried out the big clans, and warrior's world, and the big OTD chatrooms. general interest dwindled away-- either to other fresh ideas on the boards or gradually outside the forums all together. so those hugely active threads (while very entertaining at their peak) were never sustainable