* Deathsword waits for people to ask him why pony discussions are banned, who is Dariush and why should you care and other mystical secrets of the forums
I think I should create a folder in my desktop with various essays on B12 history, just so I can drop them in threads.
Dariush is old news, now? I remember when he was new!
On this very board there once was a thread about them ponies, and it went well. It gaine megathread status, stanidng tall with the likes of the now-buried MSPA megathread. It was graced by faces many, including the infamous Necro910. Fanfics and opinions were shared freely, and it went well. Slash fics were shared, and it went well. Then rapefics were shared and the Toad did recoil in horror, handed out warning and nuked the thread. So was pony discussion banned, save for the modding forum.
I should add that was not the reason Necro was banned.
I remember that. Did that alt-forum ever take off?
Toady only banned ponies permanently after the second or third pony thread descended into terribleness.
A long time ago, there was no lower boards. People could also change their names at will during that time. If I recall correctly, penguinofhonor once mentioned that his current name was not his original one. There was only one board, where everything went, Various Nonsense. In that board, there was a thread. I have no knowledge of how the thread started, but it eventually became a thread where people would use penguin avatars. Usual B12 fad. Then things got out of hand. By the end, the thread had jumped around every single board, culminating in the invasion of Announcements. People were impersonating ToadyOne and ThreeToe. There were even plans to spread the penguins to other forums. Toady eventually banned a lot of people, locked name-changing (you have to ask him instead, nowadays) and nuked Various Nonsense, remaking it into the lower boards of today.
My memory of this is pretty vague. I don't even remember if this was on the old forum software or the new one. This has always been my name on this forum, though, so that wasn't how it started.
I had no avatar at that point (or maybe just a lame penguin photo from google images) and for some reason in some thread, inaluct made me my penguin avatar (he's been banned since then). Some other people thought it was cool and asked for them, some people made their own. Then the penguin party thread appeared for them.
Understand, this was in the update gap before DF2012 and there wasn't a DF-independent community like there is now in the lower boards. So as people got more and more bored between releases, the tone of Various Nonsense got sillier and people started doing more ridiculous things. The penguin thread fit right in.
At some point people decided to elect either a VN government or a penguin government. I forget which. It might have been in the penguin thread, but it might have been separate. I know that's how I got my Minister of Love title. Of course, governments breed nationalism and we soon got greedy for territory. Eventually the penguin party turned into something like a penguin juggernaut.
That's when the attack on Other Games happened. I think a couple threads appeared in DF general discussion and/or the Armok 1 forum as well. I don't think we actually made it much further up than that. My memory of it is that Toady shut it down pretty damn quickly.
VN was long before DF 2012. It was long before my time, and I joined somewhere around 38c.
EDIT: And Grisha5 is Pathos. Someone else wanna explain that one?