25 years of Civfanatics - a retrospective

[Birdjaguar]

There was a short period of time in Off topic when Two Cow humor was all the rage. I cannot recall the year and did not record it in my saved posts. Here are two as a reminder of that time:

Celtic cows in a mystic dance
Hold Cuivienen in a trance
On ancient stones in blood she soaks
Crowned in laurel and boughs of oaks.


Betazed's cows, quark and gluon,
Provide cud for us all to chew on.

[EDIT]I found a date: December 2010!

 

[Birdjaguar]

End of Chamber and Tavern split on Off Topic.

At one point in probably 2014, OT was split into two parts: The Chamber and The Tavern as a way to separate more serious posting from less serious posting. It was an attempt to increase serous discussion and improve moderation. By June of 2015, we recognized that it was not working and recombined the parts with a few exceptions. What particular thread I was talking about is lost to me, but the I did take note of the event. IIRC A&E was created at that time.

6/28/2015

Unsticky this thread and let it sink,
Its news is old and not in sync
With the current state of OTs status,
Or the structure of its apparatus;

Gone the Chamber and the Tavern too
It's just OT to mix our roux;
Separation yields to unity
That benefits, now, the whole community;
A few outliers twist in the wind,
All their posting greatly thinned,
But now were back where we'd begun,
Not two, not three, but mostly One.

 

[danjuno]

Lol, I remember the reaction the partition of OT as well.

 

[Patine]

End of Chamber and Tavern split on Off Topic.

At one point in probably 2014, OT was split into two parts: The Chamber and The Tavern as a way to separate more serious posting from less serious posting. It was an attempt to increase serous discussion and improve moderation. By June of 2015, we recognized that it was not working and recombined the parts with a few exceptions. What particular thread I was talking about is lost to me, but the I did take note of the event. IIRC A&E was created at that time.

6/28/2015

Unsticky this thread and let it sink,
Its news is old and not in sync
With the current state of OTs status,
Or the structure of its apparatus;

Gone the Chamber and the Tavern too
It's just OT to mix our roux;
Separation yields to unity
That benefits, now, the whole community;
A few outliers twist in the wind,
All their posting greatly thinned,
But now were back where we'd begun,
Not two, not three, but mostly One.

Lol, I remember the reaction the partition of OT as well.
View attachment 748415

I don't know. Sounds like it was a good idea, in theory. It must have been something in the application. Or maybe just mass spite. I was active on CivFanatics in 2014, but I don't remember this scheme.

 

[danjuno]

I don't know. Sounds like it was a good idea, in theory. It must have been something in the application. Or maybe just mass spite. I was active on CivFanatics in 2014, but I don't remember this scheme.

TBH, the grumbling about it is the only thing I remember.

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

test of time

ISWYDT

 

[Lord_Hill]

This is obviously way too late, but a cool example of firaxis people getting involved here that I stumbled across not so long ago. Flicster, the first program which allowed new unit graphics to be added to civ 3, was able to be written because a firaxis guy came on here and answered a bunch of questions about civ 3's custom flc file format.

S

Post in thread 'Flic Images'

Nov 14, 2001

Mike Breitkreutz of Firaxis sent me this today:

The details of our FLC format are somewhat tricky and they are complicated by the fact that there are a few (non-fatal) bugs in the format which have been corrected in the code but not in all of the FLC files (so that the artists didn't have to re-build all of the FLCs). This is probably not the best implementation of a FLC format and I would have done some things differently had I created the format. For example, I would not have used the "reserved" area of the FLC header to store internal data -- especially since the FLC format supports...

• SWB

• 

 

[The_J]

I didn't know about that, also a great addition to the thread .

 

[Birdjaguar]

I'm sure there are many more stories readers, players, members could tell.

 

[WildWeazel]

(catching up on the actual content)

12 people who have in some way limited moderator rights (such as moving thread and sticking them; no access to the staff forum). That includes the staff from the ScenarioLeague, and otherwise mostly modders with bigger subforums (such as Rhye).

Interesting, this is the first I've heard of non-staff moderation powers. This would be very useful for the OpenCiv3 subforum, where I always feel awkward pinging a mod just to rotate stickies.

The users we mourn

We've maintained a memorial thread of our own in Civ3 C&C where we've known of several members lost over the years, mostly recently our dear @Ozymandias

Okay, but the forum is 25 years old, and many things have changed in between. Blake has also gone back in time, and collected our looks over time:

He missed a classic one which someone found recently, and I believe from the time I joined

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Amazing that CFC is still around. Congrats and good job guys for carrying on.

 

[Evie]

Now that's one name I haven't seen in a long time! Hey Knight-Dragon!

 

[Thunderfall]

Good to see you here again, Knight-Dragon!

Amazing that CFC is still around. Congrats and good job guys for carrying on.

It's all thanks to the great team of volunteer admins and moderators that we have!
I haven't been involved with the day to day operations of the site much in recent years.

 

[Kyriakos]

Lol, I remember the reaction the partition of OT as well.
View attachment 748415

It was a different time - back then the OT hadn't yet been reduced to nothing. I think that political threads should exist in their own forum, although by now even that isn't guaranteed to revive OT proper.
Imo it's still worth a try - if not for anything else, it would obviously remove the current hideous clutter.

 

[danjuno]

OT was always a political thunderdome (at least as long as I've been here), the main difference seems to be instead of each news story or political topic getting it's own thread, all the discussions have been herded into a few threads. I actually went back and looked at the site in the way back machine and this seems to be the case. There are also a bunch of discussions that belong in the other Colosseum boards that are piled up in OT.

 

[Kyriakos]

OT was always a political thunderdome (at least as long as I've been here), the main difference seems to be instead of each news story or political topic getting it's own thread, all the discussions have been herded into a few threads. I actually went back and looked at the site in the way back machine and this seems to be the case. There are also a bunch of discussions that belong in the other Colosseum boards that are piled up in OT.

We should agree that the sub has been mass depopulated, and having a poor selection of iterative threads (typically on US politics) imo clearly didn't help. But I am sure we can deal with more elegant issues in a 25-year celebration thread than that black cauldron

 

[Patine]

OT was always a political thunderdome (at least as long as I've been here), the main difference seems to be instead of each news story or political topic getting it's own thread, all the discussions have been herded into a few threads. I actually went back and looked at the site in the way back machine and this seems to be the case. There are also a bunch of discussions that belong in the other Colosseum boards that are piled up in OT.

I definitely agree that certain topics in OT could benefit from being spiraled off into the Colosseum. I've actually, at times, considered proposed such. Just making a fine line between civility and ranting - even though I admit I have been complicit in the latter, at times.

 

[Birdjaguar]

OT was always a political thunderdome (at least as long as I've been here), the main difference seems to be instead of each news story or political topic getting it's own thread, all the discussions have been herded into a few threads. I actually went back and looked at the site in the way back machine and this seems to be the case. There are also a bunch of discussions that belong in the other Colosseum boards that are piled up in OT.

The biggest change over the past decades has been that the teenage and college age population of the site has grown up (and not been replaced) and as they have grown up and into RL jobs and families, their time and energy has changed it focus. In addition, there are now many more alternatives for social media posting and engagement. It is unrealistic to expect that over 25 years that the participation here would not change as the membership aged. As the participants aged and changed, so too did the nature of the conversations. We all have different focuses now as the world around us has changed and our attention has been drawn to new areas of interest. There is no going back. We can only move forward in the best way we know how.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Indeed. I noticed that the Civ 7 general discussion forum is already pretty deadish - no traditional influx of hordes of new posters hungry for new Civ stuff. Wasn't Civ 7 released pretty recently?

Guess either Civ 7 sucked really badly or people just don't get on old-school forums for gaming stuff these days.

 

[Patine]

Indeed. I noticed that the Civ 7 general discussion forum is already pretty deadish - no traditional influx of hordes of new posters hungry for new Civ stuff. Wasn't Civ 7 released pretty recently?

Guess either Civ 7 sucked really badly or people just don't get on old-school forums for gaming stuff these days.

I think a lot of those that had been in the Civ6 forums have filtered back to their favourite older Civ iteration forums.