25 years of CivFanatics! We're older than some of our members here, which is a great feat in these times. We're hoping for at minimum another 25 years, and in best cases a forum which stands the test of time! Many things have changed and happened, so let's look back.
The following retrospective is the work of multiple staff members, and a part was already collected in the 30 years civ anniversary, but will be repeated here as well.
Well, actually, Quintillus went down into the archives, and found this is not true:
Technically, the 25th anniversary is only of the name of the site and a migration, as Blake00 explains here. Our About Us (https://www.civfanatics.com/about/) also explains that our history dates to 1998. We can see from Thundefall's Geocities page that CivFanatics existed, if not in its current form, on or before December 11, 1998. And from the guestbook, we can see that the site was already at least somewhat known by August of 1999. Alas, the first 54 entries are not available, so it doesn't tell us who was the first to sign the guestbook and refer to Civ.
The site news also tells us that by February of 1998:
Thundefall said:
Thus the page and the "Civilization Fanatics" name predate February of 1998. When exactly is not clear, but September 1997's entry notes:
Thunderfall said:
November 1, 1997 notes:
Thunderfall said:
The first specific mention of Civilization is that February, 1998 mention of it having a new look. To me that suggests there is a good chance that the initial creation was during that fast creation of features during the first few weeks of November, 1997, although it could have been in the end of October or later in 1997 or early 1998, prior to adding the great new look in February of 1998.
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:
Spoiler :
Our stats
At the time of writing this, the forum has 613,558 Threads, 16,430,334 posts and 307,447 Members. Many of these will be bots, and our internal stats how that the thread were we log bot bans has 22.000+ posts, and the recycle bin forum where we store... well.... everything bad has 22.400+ threads with 59.800+ posts. Our thread for regular bans has 41.000+ posts, although that doesn't mean 41.000 members got banned. Probably a lot less, as we reguarly kick out our repeat offenders for a week. Permanently banned seem to be 13.189 right now, according to the internal stats.
With all the different forums, we have now reached a count of in theory 656 forums and categories. As we also delete things for reorganization etc, these do not all exist. It seems we have right now 592 forums, of which a wide range is not publicly accessible, as e.g. the staff forum or private modding forums.
In the forum background a lot is organized via user groups, such as access to private subforums (like the moderators subforum), or the supporter badges. In total we have 74 user groups, of which 39 are for private modding subforums. The rest mostly relates to different obvious permission levels, such as various moderator groups, the 5 days/5 posts user group, the supporters, etc. Some of them are to have easier private discussions with the devs, so we got a private group for Firaxis, Asypr and Amplitude employees. Not much going on in these subforums though. Some of the user groups are also there to restrict user permissions, meaning we have users which are blocked from accessing the Civ6 (0 at the moment) and Civ7 forums (1), users who cannot post without a moderator having approved the posts (theoretically 5 users, in practice only 1), and users who can't write PMs (that is 4, although 1 I am not sure why, and a 5th is the April Fool's moderator). 2 more of the user groups don't have any members, and I am not sure why we have them, but I'm afraid to delete them in case there's anything else connected to them
.The forum has furthermore 37 offical moderators, and 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). The exception is, from once upon a time, that the Carlbarian has also these rights in the CivBE bug reports subforum.
For things like reports and warning we don't have a good stats overview at the moment. It seems though that over the lifetime of CFC we have accumulated ~55.000 reported posts. A quick check on some member profiles revealed that one of the highest warning counts is 166 in total (and that is not Perfection!), but we could have people with more.
Forum timeline
You can find the release timeline of the main civ titles also here.
- 2000, October: First post https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/grand-opening-of-our-ubb-forums.4740/
- 2001, October: Civ3 released (North America)
- 2002, March: Civ3 released (rest of the world)
- 2002, August: Forum reaches 20.000 members https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/more-than-20-000-members.28627/
- 2004: Civ4 announced. I actually can't find the announcement, but this seems to be one of the earliest threads with actual information
- 2005, December 31: forum post count reaches 1MM
- 2005, October: Civ4 released
- 2006, December: Launch of the Polycast, https://polycast.civfanatics.com/classic/
- 2007, August: First serial "random raves" thread https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/random-raves.237816/
- 2008, March 6: CFC Hacked (information about this seems lost)
- 2008, June: CivRev released
- 2009, October: Civ Network/World announced, by Sid himself! https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/announcing-civilization-network.339474/
- 2010, Feb: Civ5 announced https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-v-announced.354021/
- 2010, September: Civ5 released
- 2010, October: The modiki is created https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-modding-wiki.387195/
- 2011, January: ScenarioLeague moves to CFC https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/official-forum-move.409749/
- 2011, March 22 Capellan makes the 10 millionth post
- 2014, April: CivBE announced https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/sid-meiers-civilization-beyond-earth.524177/
- 2014, April: Launch of the "One More Turn" podcast https://civcomm.civfanatics.com/omt/episodes1.php
- 2014, July: CivRev2 released
- 2014, October: CivBE released
- 2016, May: Civ6 announced https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/sid-meiers-civilization-vi-announced.567140/
- 2016, October: Civ6 released
- 2016, October: The forum gets a new style, with the help of @sukritact https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civ6-forum-style-unveiled.599253/
- 2016: Forum moves to Xenforo v1 https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/forum-migrated-to-xenforo.576117/
- 2022: Forum moves to Xenforo v2 https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/update-site-upgrades-are-coming.677839/
- 2023, February: Civ7 announced, kinda https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...-presses-next-civ-game-in-development.682210/
- 2024, June: Civ7 announced, really https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-7-announcement-and-teaser-trailer.690083/
- 2025, February: Civ7 released
- 2025, April: CFC gets hacked again https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/compromised-moderator-login-your-data-is-safe-though.697543/
The devs really check the forums
Sometimes people wonder in how far the developers listen to the complaints, thoughts, and general ramblings of the user base in the forums. We know they do, and you can even check it yourself! While not very prominent, various personel from Firaxis has accounts here, and especially after release you could see them checking the bug reports sections. Even Sid himself has an account here, but he's sadly not an active member. But there is more to it.
The "official" fan mods
Many of the expansion packs for Civ included mods. All official? Well, kinda. The Civ4 expansion included the mods "Fall From Heaven", "Rhyse And Fall" and "Road To War", which are both actually fan-made expansions. The bigger brother of "Fall From Heaven" is it's second part, abbreviated FfH2, which has a giant forum here on CFC, with various modmods, and Rhyse and Fall, well.. Rhye has been modding Civ since Civ2, and is currently working on the version for Civ5.
Kael, the lead designer of FfH2, got, due to this work on his mod, also a job at Stardock, the developers of "Galactic Civilizations", and actually developed his own fantasy game, and many more games have followed. He also has his own wikipedia page.
@Dale, the creator of "Road To War" also went further in this direction, currently working at Mohawk Games, which have released Old World, also a game which many in the civ community play for a neverending number of turns.
This did not stop at Civ4 though. Also for Civ4: Colonization Dale and Snoopy worked initially only on a small patch to fix certain issues... and also this patch got elevated to official status, and was included in the patch 1.1 for Civ4: Colonization. You can find their original thread here.
The Giant Death Robot
In the Civ4 mod "Next War" there was a big, bad-ass robot. Nobody cared. In Civ5, the "Giant Death Robot" was announced as being part of the game. Oh, what outrage. There were so many complaints, from the name, the concept, people demanding its removal and demanding the option to deactivate it.
But you know what? It's probably the most ancient CFC meme there is, from the ancient times of 2004. Who would have thought?
Beta-Testers
You want the last proof that the devs listen to the community? Open your Civ manual. Get to the last pages, and check the credits. Since including Civ3 there have been members of this forum, as well as Apolyton and WePlayCiv, been a part of the beta-testers, and the names are all credited there. In Civ3, the vikings also had a city called "Thunderfall" (after the CivFanatics founder), a greek city called Apolyton (after the other old Civ fansite besides CFC), among other easter eggs. What more proof do you need
?...and... developers themself
The Apolyton user alexman was one of the most prolific posters in the Civ3 days, digging very deeply into some of the game's mechanics, and optimizing his strategies. He got hired at Firaxis as probably one of the first people in the industry to make the transition from community to dev, certainly the first in Civ. So Alex was on the programming team for Civ4, and then led the design work for both expansions as Soren moved on, and today of course Alex is working on Old World.
Jon Shafer was known as Trip back in the day, and was very active on Apolyton (he obviously also has a CFC account). He modded Civ3 and was one of the community members hand-picked by Soren to join the Civ4 playtest group (and, as far as we know, this group, as it started then, has been a pivotal moment for Civ). Jon did some great work on the in-development Civ4 and really explored the modding system, so he got an internship at Firaxis and later joined full-time, working with Alex on both Civ4 expansions and then getting the privilege of being Civ5's lead designer.
Community efforts
Computer gaming is stereotypically seen as a rather unsocial hobby.
Yet, we have the "Game of the Month", where you can play the same game and discuss best strategies with other people, and the "Hall of Fame", where your achievements can be logged here publically.
Even despite their ages, we have these going on here at CFC currently from Civ3 to Civ6, and had for a while for Civ2... and even for Civ1, until 2017! Yes, this game can keep you captured for ages.
We even sometimes work together for Civ. Not only for modding, but also for translations. The German community made their own fan translation for Civ4 in addition to the official one, and there exists also a Finnish community translation for Civ4.
And if you're feeling the most sociable, then MP is the way to go. While playing in the CivPlayers league is maybe the most obvious thing to do, the past Civ games also had a very particular community effort: The "Democracy Games" (DG), including the "Intersite Democracy Games" (ISDG). These games were basically play-by-email games, but you would coordinate your empire with a team of players. Some people would take over the military, posting the screenshots, and you'd discuss what move to do next. Other people would serve as ambassadors to the other players, conducting the diplomacy, and so on. Obviously these games were never fast, not even in the slightest sense, taking years at the end. But they were still fun, and definitely brought together the Civ3 and Civ4 community, even over the different fan sites. Maybe we'll see another one for Civ7, who knows?
Other projects which have at least some involvement of CFC are also the Polycast, a civ-themed podcast which has been running for a long time since 2006, first by our ancient member @DanQ, as well as @Locutus , afterwards by @CanusAlbinus . Dan also still runs since 2014 the "One More Turn" podcast.
And we also have the Modiki, a modding wiki, which has been initiated with lots of work form our member @deanej .
Forum threads worth reading - on topic
This forum has produced lots of interesting threads over the 20+ years of its existence. Some of them are worth revisiting.
- Our own section "Miscellaneous": All the things we thought about preserving, which don't fit anywhere else
- Civ6 wonders in Minecraft
- Civ6: Language translations for leader sayings
- Civ6: Guessing all the leader portraits
- Civ6: All wonders as LEGO
- Civ5: Stock image scavenger hunt: Many of the buttons in Civ5 were inspired by stock images. Our users have hunted them down, and you can see their comparison.
- Civ5: Language translations for leader sayings
- Civ5: All quotes
- Civ4: Baba Yetu lyrics
- Civ4: Ask questions to Christopher Tin
- Civilization 1 HD video tour, with mods, alternative versions and more
- Civ Video Series Ep 04 - Civilization 2 HD Tour With Mods & Scenarios
- How to play Civ1 on Android
Forum threads worth reading - off-topic
- We invite contributions
GOTM/HOF highlights/summaries
HOF Civ3: All possible combinations (map sizes, difficulty level, etc) of Civ3 games result in 2800 possible games. 2195 of them have been filled for a rate of 78.4%. The emptiest tables are Deity and obviously Sid.
The Celts are the most popular Civ to play over HOF history, with 347 entries. The Mongols are the least popular, with only 12 entries.
The highest ranking Civ3Fanatic is @Spoonwood, who has finished all 4 quartermaster challenges, and currently 3 with the highest scores.
HOF III was originally just a list of the highest scoring games and only 60 total slots. It expanded considerably around Conquests with the addition of fastest-finishes for all nonhistographic victory conditions and the introduction of the Quartermaster's Challenge. HOF IV and V followed these formats to some degree, though their challenges have different names.
GOTM timeline
- 2001, February: The idea for the "Game Of The Month" is born https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/game-of-the-month.5018/
- 2001, February: The forum for the Civ2 GOTM is opened https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/welcome-to-the-game-of-the-month-forum.5016/
- 2001, November: The first Civ3 GOTM https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civ3-gotm-1-is-here.7425/
- 2005, Nobember: The first Civ4 GOTM https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civ-4-gotm-01-saves-available.143342/
- First Civ5 GOTM can't be found anymore, but the results are here https://gotm.civfanatics.net/Civ5/tsg1_results.php
- 2016, November: The first Civ6 GOTM https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/news-6otm-01-announcement-civ6-game-01.603441/
- 2025, February: The first Civ7 GOTM https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civ7-gotm01.695328/
Overall, the total amount of GOTMs for Civ3 and Civ4 each are all beyond the count of 300, and are also still running!
Our mods
We have many many mods here on the site. At some point we got with vbulletin a proper downloads database, which is still maintained, but we also have lots of downloads in parts of the forum, and also burried on the main site. There are more than 29.000 items listed in the download database. Not all are mods, as we also have plenty, plenty, plenty of items which are made for modders to be used, such as units, buildings, leaders and much more. The free sharing of content and creations has lead to many interesting and fascinating mods here, and the modding community is very valuable to us. We do believe that we still have some advantages there over the Steam Workshop, as here we can have constructive exchanges and good discussions.
The download database does not only host mods though, as we also have a range of the official patches, manuals and other random items in there.
Most of the 29.00 items come though from Civ3, where it seems we have the massive amount of 11.000 units for modders to use, as well as more than 3000 other graphics! Civ4 also contributes a lot, with more than 3000 units and more than 2000 other graphics. As Civ2 was released before CFC existed, we have less downloads there, but comparatively a lot more mods and scenarios in contrast to units or graphics. The scenario league also hosts their content on a separate page.
As mentioned earlier, the mods "Fall From Heaven" and "Rhyse & Fall" even got official. We cannot possibly give a good overview over all the great mods here though, as there are tons, and tastes are very different. There are total conversions setting the Civ titles into a science fiction setting, fantasy, alternative timelines, or very specific time episodes like the Roman empire or the medieval ages. On the other hand there are also plenty of mods which expand Civ with new mechanics, more flavoured graphics or better AI. Or they add more content, like more civs, units and more futuristic techs. There is something for everyone, you should have a look.
The most downloaded items per Civ category, which are not patchs or tools are:
- Civ1: HotSeat for Civ1, or a Japanese mod for Civ1
- Civ2: Large Earth map
- Civ3: Rise And Rule, a Civ3 expansion
- Civ4: Fall From Heaven 2, a fantasy mod
- Civ4 - Colonization: The Authentic Colonization, a re-do of the complete game
- Civ5: Enhanced User Interface
- Ci6: YnAMP - Yet (not) Another Maps Pack, including specific maps, more map sizes, cultural starts and more
- Civ7: No link here, as the current development makes sometimes old mods obsolete, such as the current leader, Sukritact's UI mods
A range of mods from our community have also been highlighted on moddb, and in various print gaming magazines, but that is a list hard to compile.
Stuff we get
I guess it's every gamer's dream to be influential enough that you get free gifts (or can politely ask for some). Seems CFC is as well.
We've distributed various games among the users, among them Zor: Pilgrimage Of The Slorfs, Pocket Civ and also copies of Civ7 (3 competitions this year), or copies of Old World (twice). Thanks to all the devs who provided us copies! We also got a quick heads-up for a now-published relevant game for us with alpha-access before the announcement. This does not happen very frequently, and is also newer, but already 2010 ainwood managed to snag a new graphics card from Nvidia.
Tales from the moderator's poison cabinet
Many weird things happen in the forum, which many users will never notice. A big part is bots and spam, which we regularly clean. Some of it is fights between users. Some of it is strange. Some tales from the poison cabinet:
- The_J: Once we got a report, saying that there was a user necroing threads of another user. I consulted with Camikaze, and we concluded that this must be a weird case of stalking, and that the user was not interested in Civ. We therefore banned them. Ainwood came later back to us, telling us the background, as he got contacted: Apparently this was a griefing mother. Her son had died, and she dug out threads here with the hope that someone would have something positive to say about her son. So... we also get sad stories.
- The_J: Once Plotinus posted completely baffled in the permaban thread that he just had kicked out a bot, which was advertising funerals. He really hoped that nobody plans a funeral based on online spam. Right after this post I had kicked out another bot, which was selling cocaine to dope horses. Apparently that is a thing. Spam was weirder in the old days.
- The_J: We get many mods n stuff, right? A user had uploaded a new scenario, looked quite nice. It was something dystopian, where the US had collapsed and broke into multiple states. A not uncommon futuristic scenario, the user had put in quite some work. Later... quite later, we got a report about this, as another user had complained something very weird in there, about... um... white supremacy. After some googling back and forth it turned out that this scenario was made after a book propagating race war. The user was a member of that big-online-hate-forum-which-shall-not-be-named. He had made this scenario to promote white supremacy, and was other there asking other members to join into the discussion to spread hate here at our side. I found the thread there, and it seemed that nobody really replied. Seems a game about world civilizations isn't that popular among white supremacists. I got rid of the scenario, and at the time I PMed also ainwood. A regular ban would have resulted in a PM (and by default also email) to the user about that he was banned. I didn't want that. I feared a troll invasion of actual nazis, so I didn't want to trigger him. Ainwood silently got rid of him via the admin panel. I was scared what would happen next, but apparently he didn't notice. Lucky us.
- The_J: Once upon a time, during the Civ5 launch, we had lots of problems with pirates. They had their own website, and would sign up here with obious dumb names like SidMeier01 or JonShafer03 to advocate their pirate server. For a time we were playing whack-a-mole there each day. They had as specific target one of the other Civ fan sites, with a specific hate towards them. One day, I sign up here, and I see the admin account of that other civ website advocating piracy stuff here. I pre-emptively kicked him out, then went to another forum where he's also registered, to communicate via there, and get his account properly re-set. So... the pirates hacked the account of a friendly site. That was... surprising. Anno 2025, their website is gone, they did not stand the test of time.
- Second hacking case: This one is kinda public, but please don't identify the user, unless they decide themself. On one of the days we notice a sad announcement: One of our moderators seems to have died. One of their friends has announced this here in the forum. We checked, and another moderator could confirm that this user and the deceased moderator knew each other in real life. We were obviously shocked, had a thread about that, and were thinking what to do. Well... until that moderator came back online. It seems they had a stalker, who had hacked their computer, then siphoned access data for multiple of their accounts. They were on a trans-atlantic flight (which the stalker knew, since they had access to everything), which the stalker then used to announce their death other all the social media and other accounts, as they had access to all of that data. The moderator was on a flight, and when they landed they got back to ... their own death, which they had to rectify everywhere. It seems that the stalker really had targeted them, and not e.g. the forum here, as they could have wrecked havoc here with a moderator account. Besides being weird and shocking, it also tells the story that we should keep our data safe, because there are crazy people out there who might abuse them.
- The_J: One of our now-banned senior OT denizens... actually went crazy. He was mostly weirdly posting music for a while, at least that's what you saw in public. Some people, including me, Birdjaguar and Arakhor got massive avalanches of PMs from him. Sometimes 15-20 in a row. He was talking about how he's the messiah or maybe the antichrist, and sometimes both... that was hard to distill. Internally, someone commented that this seems to resemble Crystal Meth abuse. We took away his rights to PM new people, as we didn't want that junk to get out of hand. We didn't ban him, as we reasoned that while he's online and PMing us nonsense, then he's at least not a danger to anyone in real life. At some point, he actually ended up making threats against people in his real life. We took the info we had, and reported him to the responsible police station, with the limited information we had about him. After a while, he wasn't active anymore, but came back a while later. He PMed us that he was institutionalized for a while, but was let go as the psychiatrist didn't think he was a danger. I've wondered for a long time if that happened due to our report or not, but I can't really say. At some point this guy started replying to old PMs from random users with his delusions. From the software side we could not prevent that. That's when he had to ban him :/.
- The_J: In the wake of the Civ7 launch, we got actually interviewed by a major European news paper about Civ and the user community. Even world class press has apparently a video game column. We were thrilled, to appear in a reputable publication. Sadly the editor deciced at the end that the interview wasn't up to their standards and it did not get published
. - The_J: We are currently working together with a university. It seems with 25 years of existence, we count as history ourself, so a department which specializes in gaming and history actually wants to research on the forum. Their study has been approved by the university and grant authority, and therefore must follow things like GDPR etc. Therefore they have a copy of CFC (only public things), and ... I actually don't know what they're doing with it, but we obviously hope to hear back what they figured out.
- The_J: Once upon a time, one of the moderators here also got so fed up with stuff not working, that they gave their credentials to one of the OT harlekins. Hopefully the only unauthorized access we really had. The user was, as it is tradition, again banned for a week.
- The_J: CivFanatics accidentally endorsed a game. When I still could access the Twitter account, I would also regularly re-tweet and quote-tweet about other games, which are interesting for Civ fans. In one case I tweeted about the game "Ozymandias" that “Every civ-fan should have this on their wishlist!”, because this game really looked promising. I had not played it. But the dev seemed to have understood it otherwise, and put this quote on the Steam page. When I noticed, I had to think about what to do in this case, as it should not appear that we've endorsed something which is objectively not good. So I rushe to ask the mods if some could play the demo, and grabbed it myself too. Luckily I actually liked it a lot, so I was happy to let the quote stay as endorsement.
The users we mourn
In the last 25 years more than 300.000 accounts have been created. Most by civ fans. Some by fans from other games. Many by bots. Many users never posted, some stayed a while, many stayed very long. And I guess nobody ever thought about this, but with such a long time, we will also have users who will never return. Multiple times we got reports from friends and family of some users that they are not anymore among us. Looking back at 25 years of CFC, it is also the time to think about the users who we miss. Not among us anymore are zkribbler, bhsup, rah, Lohrenswald, Gojira54, Cavlancer and Hrothbern. They are still remembered here, as they were well liked members of the community who are missed. So far their memory is standing the test of time. CFC shall not forget them.
A deep look into the recycle bin
The "recycle bin" is the internal forum where we move spam to, and also unsalvagable threads. Right now there are 22.400+ threads.
If we look at the binned threads with most replies, then these are like 20+ "babe threads", with scantily clad women (bikinies, etc; this includes one "Hunk" thread as well). While they are not precisely against the forum rules, there was a point when our ad provider refused to provide ads for something which was considered adult content. While this is rather an exaggeration, it's not so that you can argue much with google ads. Therefore they had to be binned.
Other selected things which we don't want to see is a thread about which American cities you'd like to annihilate (7 pages), a thread to draw Muhammad (4 pages), in-depth conversations about the hymen (6 pages), a call to bomb Iran (4 pages), a comparison between Hitler and Obama (3 pages), a thread celebrating 4/20 (2 pages), a thread relativizing Mussoline (3 pages), another defending marital rape (2 pages) and a thread proclaiming that a user doesn't like all other users here (3 pages). A good part of these threads is arguing reasonably against the OP, but some of these topics we just don't want to have pop up here when innocent people look at OT, or even worse, which could be found via google.
It also includes more benign things, like a fake announcement that the Civ5 launch was postponed. Or simpy things which users regretted posting.
Most in the recycle bin is just spam though.
A very small note here also about our download database. Normally there is nothing noteworthy there, as most deleted things in the download database were requested by the uploader to be deleted, due to redundant uploads, or similar things. There are 3 exceptions:
1) There is one specific former user who must have extensively violated copyright, and must have had external complications. So his creations have been purged from the database, and we'll get rid of them again in case someone else uploads them.
2) The second exception is that apparently once upon a time, in the ancient times of Civ2, a user had decided to create 2 Civ2 maps based on... um... images of pinup girls. I guess he wanted to let the tanks roll via very specific hills and meadows. When we stumbled upon them anno 2021 during some data migration, we decided that this isn't exactly appropriate anymore in these times.
3) The 3rd exception is a dispute between modders, where someone copied a Hearts-of-Iron mod from the Paradox forums, and the developed it further here without consent from the original developers. Actually had to go over to ParadoxPlaza to get clarifying information on this one. So that mod is also gone.
April fools':
April 1 is also regularly, but not always, an important day at CFC. We have tried to prank our users multiple times.
A list of our April fool's is below:
- 2007: CivFanatics and Apolyton are merging: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/april-fools-apolyton-civfanatics-merging.214722/
- 2011: Member moderated forums https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/member-moderated-discussion-forum.416605/ (attention, this seems to be internal right now)
- 2022 #1: Civ6 Pandemic DLC pack https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...iv-6-pandemic-pack-dlc-masks-included.676153/
- 2022 #2: Temporary database corruption, post count = 0 https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/aprils-fools-temporary-database-corruption.676150/
- 2023: 2K announces Civilization 2K23 https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/april-fools-firaxis-announces-civilization-2k23.682996/
- 2024 #1: 2K buys Paradox, Millennia is the next Civ https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...a-is-the-next-civ-game-in-development.688874/ and should we rename us Millennia fanatics? https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...d-we-re-name-us-to-millennia-fanatics.688885/
- 2024 #2: Xenforo AI moderator https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/april-fools-xenforo-enables-new-ai-features.688868/
Other notable things, which don't fit elsewhere:
- Our oldest user account is actually from 1970
- Besides Thunderfall still being active, we also still have members #9 @DanQ , #10 @Lefty Scaevola , #12 @SunTzu , #14 @ColdWizard , #20 @CivPartisan , #21 @Shadowstrike , #22 @Archbob , #36 @Matrix , #37 @damunzy , #48 @BeBro , #60 @Leowind and #71 @CornMaster , who have not necessarily recently been active, but at least logged in this decade, meaning they've been active at CFC for more than 20 years (this obviously applies to a lot more people, from approximately user 64250)!
Addendum
Things were missed in the main post, because ... uh... my memory.
The forum has various official statistics here.
- The member who has currently the most posts is @Kyriakos, with more than 78.000 (who is also one of our top modders) . There was a time when nobody thought that someone would overtake @Perfection , but it already happened a few years ago!
- The member with the most "likes" is currently @Eagle Pursuit . Personally I would have guessed that a modder would take the top spot, but it seems being helpful in its own will get you the top spot!
- While the download database does not have all the content we have, the stats there are also notable. @Delta_Strife has the most uploads , with more than 3.300, followed by a big margin by @Wyrmshadow with 2.300, and the rest of the field with 635 or less.
- Most uploads to the media gallery come from another one of our top modders, @Vuldacon with 458 images.
- The list of most points (a combo of likes, uploads, posts, membership time etc) is lead by @Birdjaguar , which comes from his excessive posting and age .
It is actually not only the forum
Our ecosystem has actually spread further, with the forum being the heart and most important part of the Civfanatics empire. We have various sites hosted here, which are more or less tightly bound to he forum, as well as social media. This includes:
- The main page www.civfanatics.com (technically not a part of the forum)
- Our modding wiki
- The Polycast podcast
- The "One More Turn" podcast
- The Civ2 scenario league
- The "Game Of The Month" webpage
- The "Hall Of Fame" webpage (currently under maintenance)
- The website of @Rhye
- The FfH2 website of @Kael
- Our facebook page
- Our Instagram
- Our subreddit
- Our Mastodon account
- Our Whatsapp channel
Other important days: The Civ4 anniversary
Yes, the great plan of the universe has resulted in the fact that the Civ4 release date is also today! Check this thread!
Acknowledgements
This post was obviously not the work of one person.
I'd like to acknowledge the following people:
- @WildWeazel , for reminding us about this anniversary. We would have forgotten. Many thanks to you!
- @Blake00 for his contributions of notable things from the past
- @Quintillus for also digging in the past
- @Birdjaguar for his deep memories
- @leif erikson for collecting information
- @superslug for keeping track of the HOF
- Everyone from staff, current and past, who have kept the site running
- Everyone who has modded civ, and uploaded their creations here, enabling many great mods
- Everyone who is on the HOF and GOTM staff, and contributes to the ongoing community challenges
- Everyone who has ever started a projected here, and put their heart into their work
- Everyone who has ever written a helpful post or guide, and therefore contributed to a nice and helpful community
- Everyone who has ever asked a honest question, enabling the helpful answers from above
- Everyone who has ever written a non-helpful but funny post, contributing to a nice atmosphere
- Everyone who has ever cared about another member here and reached out
- Everyone who has ever reported a bot or other malicious activity, ensuring that everyone here stays safe
- Everyone who considers CFC their home, and comes back to check on the site
- Everyone who is reading this, and feels they are part of this community
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