It has been interesting to keep an eye on the Qt3 active members count. Shortly before the great exodus it was sitting at a little over 1800 and a year before that around 2000. Currently it is at 1,532.
I just saw a movie about your army. They look impressive, though I found the moose mounts your generals ride a little odd.
These forums do have a tendency to outgrow their creators, which doesn’t always go over so well with them. You mention Gone Gold – that site’s “living room” was abruptly stripped away without warning, for reasons which were never really explained other than personal issues in the administrator’s life. I’ve always found it sad that the thousands of posts on that site are gone forever. I was very active there during the whole Iraq War prelude and ensuing debacle, and there were lots of great debates. I’m a historian by nature, and I occasionally go back through the record just to see how views have evolved over time. When these sites go dark that becomes impossible. Lum’s original message forum would be an interesting blast from the past too, that was my first web presence outside of Usenet. I assume it’s also gone forever…?
Fun fact: That's from an old poison warning label that was in use when I was a kid. I'm not sure if they still use it or not. But when I was a wee child, back in the 1970s, they would run a commercial during Saturday morning cartoons that was the SCARIEST FUCKING THING I'VE EVER SEEN: MR. YUK! Holy SHIT, right? I don't think I'm alone in having that goddamn thing scar me for life. I can barely watch the whole thing NOW, never mind then. So recently I've decided to use Mr. Yuk as my online avatar, because it's like the internet equivalent of carving out your enemies heart and eating it to gain their power.
Man, who doesn't know who Mr Yuk is? I remember having a couple of his stickers on stuff that was under the kitchen sink when I was growing up, but that's about it.
I remember first being told about Mr Yuk in first grade. And I'm sure part of it was the teacher explaining badly, but at the time thinking kids who drank poison because they thought a skull-and-crossbones would make them pirates must be really really stupid. But we all got free sheets of Mr Yuk stickers, and free stickers were awesome. I'm pretty sure mine ended up on everything except cleaning products under the sink.
Yeah, we had those stickers on the phone so we could easily find the poison control number, if need be.
Oh I'm familiar with Mr. Yuk. I think I've even used him as an avatar at one point in the past. I don't remember seeing those commercials but we had a ton of the stickers in my house. I used to put them on my textbooks and stuff. I wonder if you can still get those... Edit: whoa, you can get a t-shirt? Seriously tempted.
I thought the issue was that he died? Kids in their 20s and younger, apparently. None of my students knew who he was. Shameful, really, Mr. Yuk owns.
He had health issues (and I can't remember if he passed some time later), but he was still living and active when he decided to drop GG without warning.
I'm 39 (give or take three days), never heard of Mr Yuk (aside from seeing madkevin's avatar but not knowing its source) till this conversation. I do, however, remember Mr Owl, and it takes three licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. At least my Saturday morning cartoon hour conveyed the important stuff.
As someone in my 20's I am going to vouch that Mr. Yuk was introduced to me in Kindergarten and I remember stickering the shit out of everything.
I remember this grotesque homunculus encouraging me to hanker for a hunk a a slice a slab a chunk a CHEESE!
Man, that thread is just full of gold. I forgot how it all went down, but it looks like a tag-team effort. sebmojo put his leg out behind Tom by starting the thread, I pushed Tom down with the banning survey, a whole fuckton of people started kicking Tom while he was down and squirming, and then Astromarine came in and ripped Tom's jugular out. In retrospect, no wonder he flounced off.
Yeah, those female problems were making you hysterical. You're pretty lucky Tom didn't take you forcefully by the arm to march you somewhere.
I started participating in.... 2002, I think? Sometime back then. Not quite at the beginning, but a long time ago. The board back then was a smaller but a highly active & vibrant place. There were two admins back then: Tom Chick and Mark... something. I forget his last name. He was a dude in the Midwest somewhere. They were known as The Entity, but they were largely invisible as admins; they were just other posters who got a little more respect because they were the ones paying the bills. There were no bans, and there weren't even many rules. The entire community just kinda soldiered on with its own momentum. In all honesty, it felt much like it did during Tom's personal Exodus; that captured the feel of the place pretty well. There were some assholes, some people occasionally crossed A Line, and others would berate them for it, and others would claim that no Line was crossed, and, well, so it went. But mostly it was a place where a bunch of clever people who were literate and cared about punctuation and writing in general gathered to disuss... things. Political and Religious things were discussed in P&R which, despite its reputation, wasn't actually all that toxic. Many varied & interesting conversations were had in there. The Technology sub-forum was a surprisingly helpful & active tech-help center. The discussions about Movies was a cut above average and usually pretty well thought out, although it wasn't really my cup of tea. There was a lot of discussion of books and TV shows, which were even more not my cup of tea, but I imagine they were pretty interesting conversations too for those with the interest. And of course there was the Games section. At the time, the board had a *lot* of industry folks, people working as games programmers, and some games journalists as well. Many of them felt comfortable posting under their real name. And nobody gave them shit for their work. That was one of the few strongly enforced rules, and everybody helped enforce it... but the admins themselves were quick to ban the few people who shat on that rule, as soon as they noticed. But other than the very occasional screeching banshee, people discussed games, game theory, and game design with great insight & interest. There was very little fanboism tainting the discussions, not many claims of "HALO IS THE BEST GAME IN THE WORLD LOLOLOL". No, it was mostly adults chatting about a hobby they were passionate about. It worked, and it was pretty awesome. And very fun. I'm with you on both counts. No remembrance of Mr. Yuk, but Mr. Owl is a big "Why the hell is that pompous owl lecturing me?" memory.
I came to Qt3 at the start, from Usenet. Tom and Mark Asher had been doing a lot of freelance work and finally had decided to start their own site to host and pay for their own writing. They invited a bunch of us from c.s.i.p.g.s to come check it out. A week after they started it, whatever ad-sharing network they had went bust, and basically all the ad networks went out of business. It was an internet crash, and I remember it because that was when Penny Arcade went to the begging model. The front page received regular updates for like two weeks then stopped. Mark Asher stopped playing any computer games but WoW and got a real job. Tom said he'd keep doing freelance work and basically ignore the site as long as it didn't cost him a bunch of money, and the rest of us ignored the front page and kept coming back to the forums. The Qt3 forums happened because Usenet was turning to shit, and it was a place we could all go and talk to each other without the idiots from c.s.i.p.g.s. In many ways the original forum happened despite Tom. People would go to Qt3, see the old articles on the front page and think the site was dead. If they bothered to click on the Forums link, they'd find a thriving community. We joked that we were secret and exclusive. At some point Tom complained that the forum was starting to cost him real money. A bunch of people offered to donate, but that all seemed too complicated. Chet from Valve (he probably wasn't at Valve yet then, he was the Old Man Murray guy who ran POE) said he'd host the place for little or nothing. That lasted for years. Chet was an irascible, nasty, argumentative guy and got into lots of fights on the board. Eventually people would always bring up that he worked for Valve and he kind of got sick of it, so new hosting was found with stusser. I only remember two things happening in terms of board moderation back in the early years. We were all chewing over Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and pointing out various flaws or arguing that they weren't flaws, or whatever, and Brian Reynolds showed up and started taking part in the conversation. Somebody (I forget his username, though I'm sure it's in there somewhere) then took it upon himself to just hound the guy about whatever he perceived as the flaws of the game. It went really beyond the pale and was a little stalkerish. Tom banned him and instituted his "Be nice to devs" rule. The second (and it might have been before this one) was when Andrew Bub started his new site, GamerDad. He got a lot of his writers right from the Qt3 forum. Heck, he even tried to recruit me, but since I don't have kids I thought it wasn't really the place for me. Once he got the site going, basically everything he posted included a link to something on GamerDad. Bub posted a lot, and was probably one of the better posters there. The links back to GamerDad just made me roll my eyes and ignore them. I understood that the guy was trying to get something off the ground and was doing anything he could to drive traffic. Apparently Tom warned him about the relentless pimping and he kept doing it. I think it was more that everything in Bub's world at that time related to something on his site and he didn't see it as pimping at all. Anyway, he got banned for excessive pimping, which was when the pimping rule went in. It kind of makes me wonder just how many times and how often he was warned via email, given what I'm seeing in this thread about Tom's email exchanges (which seem to happen primarily in Tom's head). So those are the early bannings as I remember them. I think they were years into the site, and years apart. The moderation back then was pretty nonexistent, aside from nuking spammers.
Man, I remember being able to talk to Brian freaking Reynolds about Alpha Centauri on Qt3. To me back then that was amazing.
I really liked your summary, but I want to correct this one thing. Chet wasn't nasty; he simply didn't suffer fools gladly. (You're dead right about the irascible & argumentative parts) I really liked the guy, and was sorry when he stopped contributing. I was even sorrier that the hosting changed, and we started getting stusser (a true douchebag) occasionally posting rather than Chet.
Yeah, seriously, Chet was awesome. I love Chet. I miss Chet :(. In no way was he a problem with Qt3 at any point.
Glad you said this, because "nasty" sounds absolutely nothing like the Chet I know, both online and off. Perspective thing, I suppose, but I would never think to apply that adjective to him.
some of you may forget that, in between the times of Usenet & Qt3, they (Mark & Tom) had the "GameCenter" sub-site on CNET.
