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I think my favorite part of Raw's post there is that he has touched on both conservative gender roles there. Women need to get off the internet and back in the kitchen, and men need to go out and get jobs! Because clearly if they had jobs they wouldn't be wasting so much time on teh interwebz.

It's only because I know how much you love your beer.

@Raw - Sound's like someone needs a hug.

At this point, it doesn't really push my buttons coming from him anymore. His posts are typically just so ridiculously that I can't take him seriously enough to get upset at him. His posts garner one of two reactions: I either just laugh at how ridiculous he is, or it makes me want to pet him on the head for being so pathetic.

This is where I come in to crash the party and moon everyone.


(__!__)

That depends entirely on the ***.

The asylum today is not what it once was. It goes in phases, and much has changed since it was first formed. To understand its shaping, you have to go back to the beginning, when there was only the Everquest main and Everquest Quest forums. In those days, those two forums had the entire traffic volume that the entire forum system today has running through them. The front page 50 threads changed hourly, and more agressive tactics were sometimes warrented to keep topics you were interested in at the forefront. Not posting wasn't really an option, and threads tended to live their entire lifespan in a day, but go longer than many do now.

Some posters, Myself amongst them, perfected the art of the thread hijack and derailment. We treated it as a sport. At first, for fun, and later because we could, and there wasn't really anywhere else to post about the kind of things we would hijack the threads into. So Allakhazam created the origional "Out of Topic" and "Book" forums, bringing the count up to four, and basically tossed everyone who was hijacking the main forum into OOT. And the OOT thrived. It got just as much, if not more traffic than the main forums, but the posters in it were mainly the strong, assertive topic posting and direction types, who all had their own ideas and goals in mind for the OOT. Personality clashes ensued. We saw the rise of such posters as Thundra, Ominus Trusk, Totem, Gbaji, Jophiel, Heimiedal, Dark Illyana, Patrician Tormentcia, myself, Deleron and many others, and not all of us saw eye to eye. Public thrashings in thread ensued, and we had very little moderation at that time. It was the Wild west, but with text instead of six shooters. But people noticed, and to our suprise, people paid attention. A good flame war would increase the traffic in the forum by double. Soon we started seeing people show up specifically to participate, or to try and take that mythical "King of the hill" spot. Names like Tacosid, Smasharoo, Katielynn, baldisking, Gitslayer and others started appearing in more and more threads. Hundreds of others tried, and were ripped apart. It became almost a feeding frenzy, with people competing to see how quickly they could make the new tough guy posters crack. Even back then though, people only went after the ones that were really asking for it. And everywhere, there were the stars. As milestones passed like "first person to 1,000 posts (Tie between Usna and Praetorian), 2k (Pratorian), 3-5K Angry Hippo, 6-7K Kaolian, etc, people started to compete for those milestones. Some posted replies to everything, some created forum games. Some yelled at the creaters of forum games for destroying the forums, etc, but it was all really a means to an end.

Eventually though, things started to turn darker. Feuds went from harmless entertainment, to personal. New posters who couldn't cut it with the existing OOTers started turning to weaker newbies and driving them away. Some of the regulars lost sight of the distinction and drove off their fair share. And then someone created the first sockpuppet. Hugefemale was the first blatant trolling account we ever had, and we never did figure out who it belonged to, but it sparked a wave of them that very nearly destroyed the OOT. Most of those we found out in the end belonged to Thundra, and the story of how I dealt with those once and for all in my pre-admin days is an amusing tale for another post, but the damage was done. Allakhazam stepped in, and created the Asylum, and told all of us who were prone to engaging in flame threads, myself included, to relocate.

The Asylum grew, and the OOT withered on the vine and became basically a ghost town for several years. We resented what we saw as losing our "home" identification, so we embraced the Asylum mentality, and challenged all comers. It truely was "Us against the world, and US against Us" and for a time, things were good. Then came the first guilds in games composed of Allakhazam players from Asylum. "Farmers of Stars" was the first (the stars under your name were your star farm, post spamming to get more stars became star farming. curiously, despite still having stars the term has died out recently) composed of about 60 people from the Asylum, lead by Smasharoo, with Patrician and several other notorious figures from Asylum history as officers. It was formed basically to show that a bunch of semi psychotic gamers from a random forum who spent most of the time yelling at eachother could destroy all the competition from other guilds on the hardest server in everquest at the time, the Friona Vie roleplaying server. And it succeeded beyond anyones wildest dreams. FOS, later changed to followers of Stars due to some GM not liking Farmers for some reason, became THE uberguild of Firiona Vie in a remarkably short period of time, bypassing all the other established guilds, and life was good for a time...

Until the guild implosion.

History will remember Smasharoo as the one who started the distruction of FOS. In a fit of rage? pique? I don't really know, he deleted the guild forums, web pages, guild itself, etc. They eventually reformed without him, but the first cracks started to appear. The successor guild slowly drifted into sides, and an "Us vs. Them" mentality within the guild itself developed and spilled over into the asylum. The resulting threads were now mostly personal, and the last vestiges of restraint that had always been present was swept away. People quit the forums. Other developed lasting enimity. A few people actually joined the foums because of it, but they were largely insane, but in the end, the Asylum lost permanently at least 1/3rd of the regular posters, and for a time lost almost half of its posters. The recovery was slow, but it was happening when Four important and far reaching events occured. First, I got admin. Regardless of what impact if any my admining has had on Asylum, I was a mainstay poster before that, and more importantly one of the main topic creators, and quickest to jump into a likely flame war. After admin, my posting style changed dramatically due to constraints. The topic creation piece was critical, because there really haven't ever been that many people who consistantly create topics that are acceptable by the majority of the forum. Many people spam links, or spam text and create volume, but no substance, and this has the opposite effect of actually slowing a forum down because people don't want to waid through the crap. I was 1/16th - 1/12th of that topic origionation effort in my heyday, and losing that was significant, though overcomeable by itself. As topic rates declined, so did replies, etc. Angua and Merrikat left around that time as well.

Second, the company was sold. The asylumites had always been the longest existance posters, the most loyal in most cases, and quickest to detest RMT. when the Yantis taint link was first made public, it was not handled well. We had advised them to be very clear from the beginning that Yantis was periphrially attached, but the new owners chose not to. In the end, when it finally came to light, the truth that Yantis's company was owned by the same people that owned allakhazam.com now but there was no crossover, it seemed to many like a spin denial with little substance. Credibility was lost overnight, and we lost more posters from all the forums, but particularily Asylum.

Third, we reached server capacity. Had the company not been sold, we would have had new servers in place long before they were actually purchased, but without them the site as a whole spent 3 cripling months at a crawl. Page loads took minutes. People became frustrated and left in droves.

The fourth and final nail in the coffin of the old population levels, was the Massive DDOS attack we suffered for weeks before we could get the owners to spring for a new router with null routeing capability.

Once those four things were over, the forum landscape was forever changed. Asylum was dying. There were not enough regulars to sustain it, and the only sizeable forum population left was from a new game called Final Fantesy XI. And they did venture into the Asylum. but they found a harsh reception, and settled mainly in the OOT instead. Things continued on this way until Asylumites realized that they needed new blood. Discussions on the future of the forum took place, and people adapted or in some cases were removed. And things continued to evolve. The Asylum population was aging as well, going from a bunch of College age kids to people in the real world, with real jobs and families. The topics changed with them. besides, when you have done a thread 8 or 9 times, you start to run out of things to say. Politics and world event discussions replaced arguments for argument sake. mainstay threads from years past became familiar, and boring.

And then there was the boston meet up and Allanois in Chicago. It's hard to generate a serious argument with someone you have eaten a formal dinner with. In many ways that was the culmination of the Asylum in the forum. Many people treated Allanois in particular as a farewell tour. They came to the site for the Asylum, but also for Allakhazam, and with no more jeff, people drifted off. Work filters decreased daytime posting as well (Damn you websense! damn you to hell!)

So, in the end we are where we are at today. The remaining Asylumites can still dish out the pain if you get them mad enough, but it takes a special individual to accomplesh that anymore. OOT and Asylum are both growing, though slower than in previous years, and I hope that eventually they will break past that average 120 posters on at any given time number that seems to be the magic one for the neccessary level of forum posting that attracts other forum posters and causes faster growth. Unlike the game forums, the OOT ones are never really tied to the fortune of one game or another, and in many cases the demise of a game forum population ends in a population spike for the Asylum.

The one secret to being an Asylumite that many people never truly learn, is that you never gain Asylumite status by earning it or having someone else recognize you as such. You have to take it by force of will alone. You either know you are an Asylumite, or you aren't one.

We now return you to your regularily scheduled posting.

I...

That was beautiful. And here I always thought the Asylum was just where all the vocally liberal people went to bash gbaji and varus.

I wonder if we could ever get to something like that again...

Edited, Oct 28th 2011 2:16am by IDrownFish

Thanks for the history lesson Kao! I knew about the clashing of EQ peeps and FFXI players, but that was because that was one of the reasons I got flamed so bad. At least, after the karma camping started anyways lol. I threw a fit that they were karma camping me, because goddamnit I had earned that scholar rating due to my informative and helpful posts in the FFXI forums. Things got worse after I brought that up lol.

Ah, youth.

Kao probably copypasta'd that from somewhere.

Kao man, am I happy I started this thread. I feel like this thread should be stickied so that the history can be maintained.

Ok dark do you have enough beer for all of us. I know I like to consume large qualities. So let's party beer and boobs for everyone.