Dust off those history books, folks, we're going back in time.
I have a habit of randomly remembering things that have happened on Smogon that were pretty inconsequential, but still make me chuckle. Sometimes they're very difficult to find though, so I'd like to compile some old shit into a thread that makes it easier for me (and you) to come back to. General rule for this thread is that I'd like everything we're doing "archaeology" for to be at least ten years old, though that's not a hard and fast rule. I feel like 10+ years on these forums is enough to make something vintage, or at least a classic. Also nothing that's already been preserved in Gallery/Greatest Hits because those are obvious.
Here are the first round of highlights:
1. bugmaniacbob's lengthy Necturna analysis (2009)
Yes, you read that spoiler tag correctly. 17,000+ words for this analysis. To put that in perspective, that is more than beloved children's book Frindle, which has a word count in the 16,000s. (I bring that up because I remember an old Tumblr post or tweet referencing the length of something in comparison to Findle, and I can't find that, so any help with Frindle archaeology would be appreciated too). I looked and the character count for this analysis is over 100,000 characters, which is actually more than the current limit of 65,000 characters on Xenforo. Apparently, posts used to be able to be longer, and it didn't break on the switch from vBulletin to Xenforo all those years ago. Who would've thought? Anyway, while this analysis is not as famous as his Claydol analysis (preserved in Smogon Gallery), bugmaniacbob really showed that you can literally write novel-length analyses, and for that, we should thank(?) him.
2. bojangles' creative callout (2012)
This is a personal favorite of mine from back in the day. In the social forums ages of old, "callout" posts were pretty common. If a joke fell flat, or someone was being annoying, it was more acceptable to make a post letting them know to go lurk more (there was even a time where I made a post that I can't find right now where it was literally just two images: a Golurk and a s'more). Anyway, bojangles, who I'm pretty sure was an admin at the time of this post, stuck his nose into the social forums and found a thread that he didn't like. In fact, a thread that he thought was incredibly stupid. So he let the OP know. Thankfully, unlike the OP, whose gif links are now broken, the glorious image format that bojangles used still works, so we can appreciate this classic callout.
3. Tokyo Tom destroys kokoloko (2015) (Inside Scoop only, sorry unbadged users)
Speaking of callouts, this is probably one of the most legendary ones ever written. In this thread, now-permabanned user Stratos was complaining about his demotion. It's honestly a long thread with a lot of posts but there are some ones worth reading in there... specifically this callout. kokoloko was just trying to tell people to cut Senior Staff some slack basically, that they're not the villains that they're made out to be. And he did it in a... colorful manner. Tokyo Tom comes in to save the day and make one of the funniest callouts I have ever seen in any medium, whether that be online or in real life. BRICK SQUAD forever.
Honorable mention to the Lavos quitpost, but that's only like five years old so it's not quite vintage yet. Though I did want to mention that it's the first post on Page 5 of that thread lol
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Now that our first little history lesson is out of the way, I'd like to put out a call to action: I need help finding something on these forums. Does anyone have the link (or at least a screenshot) to the original "Overall B+" meme from way back in the day. IIRC, this was a post in Smeargle's Studio where a user famously gave an artist's work a rating of B+, which is a now (mostly) forgotten meme on this site. Thanks for your help.
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Post your own favorite pieces of forum history here too!
I have a habit of randomly remembering things that have happened on Smogon that were pretty inconsequential, but still make me chuckle. Sometimes they're very difficult to find though, so I'd like to compile some old shit into a thread that makes it easier for me (and you) to come back to. General rule for this thread is that I'd like everything we're doing "archaeology" for to be at least ten years old, though that's not a hard and fast rule. I feel like 10+ years on these forums is enough to make something vintage, or at least a classic. Also nothing that's already been preserved in Gallery/Greatest Hits because those are obvious.
Here are the first round of highlights:
1. bugmaniacbob's lengthy Necturna analysis (2009)
Yes, you read that spoiler tag correctly. 17,000+ words for this analysis. To put that in perspective, that is more than beloved children's book Frindle, which has a word count in the 16,000s. (I bring that up because I remember an old Tumblr post or tweet referencing the length of something in comparison to Findle, and I can't find that, so any help with Frindle archaeology would be appreciated too). I looked and the character count for this analysis is over 100,000 characters, which is actually more than the current limit of 65,000 characters on Xenforo. Apparently, posts used to be able to be longer, and it didn't break on the switch from vBulletin to Xenforo all those years ago. Who would've thought? Anyway, while this analysis is not as famous as his Claydol analysis (preserved in Smogon Gallery), bugmaniacbob really showed that you can literally write novel-length analyses, and for that, we should thank(?) him.
2. bojangles' creative callout (2012)
This is a personal favorite of mine from back in the day. In the social forums ages of old, "callout" posts were pretty common. If a joke fell flat, or someone was being annoying, it was more acceptable to make a post letting them know to go lurk more (there was even a time where I made a post that I can't find right now where it was literally just two images: a Golurk and a s'more). Anyway, bojangles, who I'm pretty sure was an admin at the time of this post, stuck his nose into the social forums and found a thread that he didn't like. In fact, a thread that he thought was incredibly stupid. So he let the OP know. Thankfully, unlike the OP, whose gif links are now broken, the glorious image format that bojangles used still works, so we can appreciate this classic callout.
3. Tokyo Tom destroys kokoloko (2015) (Inside Scoop only, sorry unbadged users)
Speaking of callouts, this is probably one of the most legendary ones ever written. In this thread, now-permabanned user Stratos was complaining about his demotion. It's honestly a long thread with a lot of posts but there are some ones worth reading in there... specifically this callout. kokoloko was just trying to tell people to cut Senior Staff some slack basically, that they're not the villains that they're made out to be. And he did it in a... colorful manner. Tokyo Tom comes in to save the day and make one of the funniest callouts I have ever seen in any medium, whether that be online or in real life. BRICK SQUAD forever.
Honorable mention to the Lavos quitpost, but that's only like five years old so it's not quite vintage yet. Though I did want to mention that it's the first post on Page 5 of that thread lol
---
Now that our first little history lesson is out of the way, I'd like to put out a call to action: I need help finding something on these forums. Does anyone have the link (or at least a screenshot) to the original "Overall B+" meme from way back in the day. IIRC, this was a post in Smeargle's Studio where a user famously gave an artist's work a rating of B+, which is a now (mostly) forgotten meme on this site. Thanks for your help.
---
Post your own favorite pieces of forum history here too!
