Twenty Years of TCoD

[Negrek]

All right, everybody, it's TCoD's twentieth anniversary, and that means it's time for a little nostalgia and reminiscence! What are some of your favorite TCoD memories?

I have a lot...

- The main site actually having MUSIC. I think that was phased out shortly after I started visiting, but wow! I couldn't believe that technology.

- The site approaching a big hit milestone--possibly the first million? And the hit counter going up by an absurd amount in a short period of time because people were just sitting around and refreshing the page, and Butterfree being annoyed because they weren't real hits if people were just refreshing over and over...

- When Larissa started her site... can't remember what it was called ("Orenji Pan" was her story, I think, think she called the site something else?) where so many people visited that she blew threw her free host's monthly bandwidth allowance in, like, two days. (She had some kind of randomizer script that I later stole and modified to make my metronome generator for ASB many years before I actually learned JavaScript

- Eagerly following Diamond/Pearl news while Butterfree was posting big essays on the Cave of Speculative Theories

- Butterfree buying the initial vBulletin forums and getting to cruise around on them while they were still not properly open to the public. So shiny! So many new features! New styles! The active/inactive indicators were different kinds of pokéballs (I suggested that!). Also chaos randomly showed up and Butterfree was like, "How the fuck did you even get here?"

- The first, like, month of ASB when there were dozens of posts in the forum per day, no one had any idea what was going on, we were doing tournaments, there was a Halloween event, and everything was just popping off. opaltiger vs surskitty, first battle reffed on these forums!

- Generally ridiculous ASB battles... insane togepi destruction during metronome battles, wild arenas like Kratos' one where each of the walls does something weird, one of the tournament battles where you got to define special single-round effects based on song lyrics, and I had one where pokémon could attack as though they weren't asleep based on the song "Falling Awake"... random snatches of battles here and there. Everyone naming their ASB pokémon "Lutchrium" for some reason. Logging on to my grandparents' awful dial-up internet after doing presents on Christmas to unveil the ASB gifts of the year.

- Abusing the old HTML signature system to set up a Javascript snippet that would let me change my avatar to one of several different expressions for a particular post. I worked really hard to come up with a way to define what expression should be used for given post without anyone catching on, and I don't know if anyone ever noticed they weren't just random, lol.

- The early days of mafia, with huge games like OG TVTropes mafia, Kratos' Tales of Symphonia evolution mafia, and many more!

- The time Kratos and I teamed up to make the forums SBaHJ-themed for a day, and then having to completely redo it all due to epilepsy concerns, and then iirc releasing Joltik Style, with the joke of it not actually being a joke? And then me also accidentally turning on the elusive pumpkin for years afterwards because I'd unwisely put the code in a vBulletin extension I used a lot when I was doing quick vBulletin mods.

- The April Fool's where everyone was roleplaying Team Rocket characters in the news forum

- Making everyone's fave Scyther for a day

- The more-than-yearlong wait for one of Butterfree's TQftL chapters, and then the final run of chapters where she finally finished the story off!

It's not quite twenty memories for twenty years, but I think that's plenty to be going on with. Hope to see some other fun stories in this thread!

 

[Kung Fu Ferret]

20 years? I've been here for less than half, but wow!

 

[Herbe]

TCoD memories!!!!

I think one of my favorite forum memories was Capitalist Democracy Mafia. I had already had a few mafia games under my belt -- ORAS mfia was the first one I ever played :3 -- and so I had some degree of confidence and comfort with the community and the game structure at that point. There was a voting-with-money structure, and town got a nightly allowance and scum didn't, and I had a jailer power that took a person's allowance for the night. What it basically got down to was I jailed someone who was scum and got no money from them and solved out the game based on that, but I felt so fucking cool for figuring it out. I was so Ace Attorney about it. And then it came to a huge bidding war with people outbidding what they had in their pockets and it was hilarious and awesome and the votes between me and the mafia I found came down to a difference of 2 dollars. Razor thin margins!!! Winning that mafia game was the most memorable mafia of like, my pre-revival forum life here.

Back in those days I also frequented some irc's, like the reddit writing prompts irc. I had made a good couple of friends there, and I was talking to one of them about this ~~obscure pokemon forum~~ that I liked hanging out at. Well, that friend had actually been a member here in the past! He left after some sort of perceived dip in activity and was surprised to find out it was still active. I got him to come back, actually, and we had some fun times here back then.

ASB was also so much fun back in the day. I loved spectating and I also loved battling, and I had a lot of fun with my ASB pokemon and got really attached to them. It used to be so active! Honestly I would love getting the gears back turning somehow there. Consider this an open challenge :)

Mmm... TCoD main site held a lot of memories too. Magikarp: the Gathering was a lot of fun, even though I never got very far. I remember finding the secret link for the first time so vividly and I can't spoil it here but that really stuck with me :) I felt so accomplished. I even finished the Clue Game in 2020!! I also remember the pixel art guides fondly and used them as I started to learn pixel art, I even opened up a little sprite shop on the forums here. (That's my dittlett I made that's my profile picture right now :3 ) And I used the html guide early on to learn html! Although I didn't have anywhere to host it and it was just local files, I still remember the first draft of a website I made. Bare bones as hell but it was my best attempt :) I think I even got onto the hall of fame quiz completion lists under the name Lilypad. I also finished all of The Quest for The Legends!! Adore that fic. I spent so much time with it, it was wonderful.

Forum revival mafia was already two years ago ?!?!?! God that was such a blast. I loved being mafia in that game, and the loversgambit with mawile absolutely should not have gone as good as it did. Kyeugh really finished out clutch there for the win for mafia. That was just spectacular all around and also hundreds and hundreds of pages wow,,,, And MF with her accursed minion memes!!! She would /only/ speak in minion memes in scumchat. I don't even remember the reasoning behind it. It was beautiful.

Also there was some mafia where I had an extra account that I could do what I pleased with and communicate out of thread with other players; I turned it into Tucker, I made an honest to god Farmer's Only profile for him, and went fishin for love.

I adored running Animal Crossing and Hamilton Mafia. Animal Crossing was the first mafia I ever ran and I feel like it went spectacular :) And in Hamilton, the crack bonus-ending actually ended up happening! Absolute bastardry. Arsonist win and the family members that /could/ survive with Arsonist Eliza did end up surviving somehow somehow.

Tarot Mafia... RNP was some sort of terrorist and affixed a Tower Bomb to me. Basically, I had a handful of rules: I /had/ to vote for Stryke that day, and I couldn't reveal that it was against my free will or that I had any sort of bomb vest or else it would go off. Well, midway through the day, RNP basically told me in thread that he had "changed the rules" and that I was allowed to talk about The Thing. I said "Bullshit" and that had already sealed my fate but I got Absolutely Fooled into thinking that was a thing he could do, and I talked about it and got myself exploded. Absolute 4D chess over here. I was livid.

I would be remiss to omit the rap battle that led to an enemies-to-lovers story between me and RNP ^w^ It was a mafia game and I was torn between voting stryke or... qenya, I think, and it was close to randomizing anyway, and I was flip flopping back and forth and did my final flipflop onto Stryke literally 3 minutes before EOD, and rnp was like "this is so suspicious" and voted me for it, and then started rap battling me about my choice ?!?!?!? And yeah I tried to counter but I got absolutely trounced I just did not have the skill there. Stryke flipped red. :^) then we rap battled in telegram for the rest of the night and the rest is history.

Should anything else come to mind strongly I will add it!!!! Obvs all the close friends I have made here have meant the world to me. And hydra-ing or neighboring in mafia is my favorite way to play, and I love the chats we had during games. Meow!!

 

[RNP]

Tarot Mafia... RNP was some sort of terrorist and affixed a Tower Bomb to me. Basically, I had a handful of rules: I /had/ to vote for Stryke that day, and I couldn't reveal that it was against my free will or that I had any sort of bomb vest or else it would go off. Well, midway through the day, RNP basically told me in thread that he had "changed the rules" and that I was allowed to talk about The Thing. I said "Bullshit" and that had already sealed my fate but I got Absolutely Fooled into thinking that was a thing he could do, and I talked about it and got myself exploded. Absolute 4D chess over here. I was livid.

you loved it

 

[Byrus]

Damn, crazy to think it's been that long. I was looking at some old stuff on the wayback machine and was able to find the TCOD conforums era. So that was a real blast from the past. I was 12 when I first joined here.

I remember Jolty made this colourful Houndoom avatar for me back then, which I'm still really fond of, honestly. Also, please check out this hilariously edgy caption my little tween self came up with. I'm shocked that everything was spelled correctly..

 

[storm]

twenty years ;; it's been so long!!

I have so many fond memories of the activity, of the atmosphere... I remember reading and lurking on all sorts of threads and being deeply impressed by what the community was willing to discuss and debate over. I give a lot of credit for my teenage views to how willing people were to talk about politics, identities, and facets of life I hadn't encountered at the time!

all the creativity on display!! different fansites, ambitious fanfics (some even being posted to their entirety!), art, and coding. and as someone who spent a lot of time rping, I do have mixed nostalgia for all the edgy and dramatic roleplays people came up with. does anyone else remember the rack shackle pack. am I the only survivor...

I lurked a lot of the really wild mafia games - I distinctly remember the tv tropes and tales of symphonia games! - as well as the innovative asb battles and contests. I also recall the sbahj and joltik skins being launched!! I had not been a homestuck yet and to have what felt like a third of the forum start memeing in sync about it was mystifying

there used to be dedicated, recurring trolls and problem members, which it does feel a bit weird to be nostalgic about... I imagine the staff team was generally fed up with them, but from the side it was often very funny to witness them rolling through periodically

there were a lot of trends that seemed to sweep through? I remember everyone having the same style of icon for a bit, or their username including "kthxbai" in it. oh also!! did we not have fights over reputation (and also postcount. so many arguments about postcount being turned off in some sections)???

I do also remember a lot of drama and disputes intertwined with all of this, but now with my own forum management experience under my belt for [hazy number] of years, I can say tcod honestly seemed richly vibrant and surprisingly calm for most of the time I was there. I'm glad it's still here, and that I have a chance to revisit these memories and some of the people involved <3

 

[Veezle]

I come late to the party :\

 

[ValyceNegative]

I've been on the forums for what can be considered an eyeblink-fraction of time compared to TCoD's long life, but I still have memories of kid me browsing the mainsite some 16-15 years ago. I was an external lurker/visitor of many sites at the time and way too shy to interact :P

I remember several of the old mainsite splashpages! Especially the one with Butterfree roasting a marshmallow on Charizard's tail, and the last one ever that I saw which was a picture of Charizard and Butterfree toy along with a plushie? It was a legendary but I can't remember which one. I found the extended use of mascots and their backstories very entertaining.

 

[mewtini]

i just saw this ... MAN. no freaking way it's been so long. i'm late to this party but i have to pay my respects <3

this site + the forums literally raised me! butterfree's html tutorials are unironically probably the reason i work in tech full-time now. i remember being so engulfed in that and in spriting (remembering my sprite shop ...) and art and admiring what was then an incredibly active fanfic/artist community. it's weird to think that so much of my interests, my career, honestly a big chunk of my life was informed by stumbling upon this site. just because i was a little pokemon freak, hahaha.

and then the forums ... god. the forums. i guess i was here as a Little Childe back in 2011? and now it is 2022 and i am 21. i am a full complete independent adult. Man. man.

without any exaggeration i absolutely do not think i would be the same person that i am today without TCoDf. i've met some of my best friends here, and others who i no longer keep in touch with but i think about constantly. for all the times that i received support as a young preteen, teen, adult here going through some of the hardest times in my life -- and all the times i had so much fun here -- i can't imagine another group of people i would've wanted to spend those moments with. even with all the drama, like the multiple faked deaths, certain infamous users ... it's at least given me a few good stories ;-)

i love TCoD/f and so many of you endlessly endlessly endlessly. i will never forget y'all.

 

[IndigoClaudia]

woag

 

[Palamon]

Oh, wow, 20 years? That's amazing, congratulations.

I think I joined around...2009-ish...and only peek around sometimes, but still.