The History of TTTNE

The first and original TTTNE was created by OsRavan in late 2004 as an experiment after the post limit on threads was removed giving all threads a theoretically infinite post count. The main subject of discussion in that first thread was cheese. Cheese and alcohol. Excitement levels reached fever pitch as they neared the first 1000. Who would get the coveted 1k post? It was the most intense race of all time with dozens of people posting at the same time. The eventual winner was someone who had never posted once in the thread before that point, that's right the first 1k was stolen by a non-spammer. KSI - short for King Slayer Imp was that first winner. A boarder of infamy and controversy if ever there were one. He has since been perma-banned from the board, not for stealing the first 1k in TTTNE but for more serious rule breaking offences.

That first TTTNE rolled on for maybe 5000 posts or so and then the thread was closed and locked. A furious uproar was raised by those that had come to love the slow moving chat and cheesy spam of TTTNE and so they started another TTTNE which made it to a couple of thousand posts before being closed. So another thread was created but again that got closed down, this time very quickly. Another thread created and that was also closed immediately. There followed a period of what might be termed board civil war. Colder Hands was foremost amongst those arguing for the existence of TTTNE and received several week long bans for his arguments with the Mods. Others stepped up to defend this place, Jagged, Space Bandito and many others.

Finally in 2005 Ran created Forum Games. A place where posts would not count towards a members' post total. Mafia and other games, TTTNE and other threads considered spam got shunted into Forum Games. The Gen Chatters felt like their forum could return to serious debate and political discourse and the spammer were just happy to have somewhere to exist.

There followed a Golden Age of spam. A single great and glorious TTTNE that lasted for 23,000 posts. It was early in that great thread that the first Spamsmoot was held with Jagged emerging as the victor and first Spam Lord of TTTNE for 2006. 14th Dragon erected (ie: made up) the TTTNE swimming pool / bar / hot tub / massage table / dungeon complex that became our home. It was during this time that I finally joined the board after lurking for many years, climbing what became known as Mount Everspam much to the amusement of those watching me reading the backlog. My first post is preserved for posterity if anyone cares to read it. The spam rolled on into a second year and at the 2007 Spamsmoot we had a clear winner in Colder Hands, the Hand of the previous Lord.

TTTNE had something of a reputation for sex talk and it is true there was quite a lot of it in those days with saucy orgies in big vats of pudding. Lady Isabel was mainly responsible for that. And it was during this time that we had the Sleepy Pillow incident. Quoth will not thank me to remind him of that though it was Mad Moose who was the more embarrassed. Sleepy Pillow was a man pretending to be a woman, a woman into kinky sex of pretty much any kind. She claimed to be bisexual living with her girlfriend who she had sex with like all the time and owned loads of vibrators. Mad Moose and Quoth fell for the story in a big way. I won't go into too many details but it ended with some kind of weird three way involving Sleepy Pillow, moose antlers and feathers. Feel free to fill in the details yourselves. Soon after it came to light that Sleepy Pillow was an alt of Contra Rose, aka Twisted Puppy and several other names, all the same person and a real trouble maker. They got perma-banned but for Mad Moose and Quoth the damage was done.

Sadly in the end that great thread became so massive that it was causing Ran problems with the nightly back-up process and he had no choice but to close it. Ran in his benevolence gave us two weeks notice of the closure. On that fateful day I landed the penultimate post with DJ Dawn claiming the final post.

After that we began the tradition of having 1000 post threadlets with the spammer who claimed the 1k post winning the honour of opening the new thread and naming it. CH was instrumental in negotiating this deal with Ran and the Mods. After his reign ended Space Bandito (Hand of CH) was victorious in the third Spamsmoot. There was one very memorable thread in those early threads where Lany threatened to blow the place up though I don't recall why. In secret she asked a mod to close the thread early. The mod (I think it was probably Sophelia) posted around the 500 mark with simply the word "BOOM". Lany immediately started up a new thread which was set on a ship sailing away from the destruction of the swimming pool / bar complex. Thus followed a time of themes and many different places in which TTTNE was set. Many people choosing appropriate avatars which they kept just for that one thread.

It was during this time that I began the "Almost Daily Spam Review". A round-up of the best spam from the previous day or last couple of days (hence the almost daily). This became a necessary service for most followers of this thread since we were getting through 1000 posts in just 2 or 3 days, sometimes quicker, and there was no way to keep up on everything without the reviews.

Then one day the 10 minute limit on consecutive posts was lifted. Previously any new post you made within 10 minutes of the last (provided yours was the last post in that thread) would have been merged together. Post merging became a thing of the past to be replaced by Flood Control. There followed what can only be described as an "orgy of spam". People went nuts and posted, and posted and posted. This all happened one evening (my time) so when I came into work the next day to start work on the Spam Review I was astonished to discover not one new thread but THREE full and complete brand new threads. Over 3000 posts to review! This little mountain goat rolled up his sleeves and began climbing and reviewed all three of those threads in one day. I began posting them, one long review post after the other, something that would not have been possible the day before. The page creaked and groaned under the weight of so much content and it broke, refusing to load for many people eager to read the review. That fateful page was number 40 and many people still give a shout out to the goat that broke the page upon reaching page 40 of any given threadlet.

Another memorable thread from around that time was when a thread from General Chatter was moved into Forum Games because it was deemed to be spam. That thread was the Pretty Pretty Princess thread, something about men wearing pink I seem to recall. Someone said that thread was like TTTNE and in fact the two should be merged. Forum Games mod Sophelia thought this was an excellent idea and used her mod powers to do just that. The two threads were merged. What happens in this situation is that all posts are arranged in chronological order with the oldest post becoming the first which dictates the name of the thread. The Pretty Pretty Princess first post was the oldest and so we did not strictly have a TTTNE for a few days while that lasted. Reading through the scrambled mess of posts, some from TTTNE, some from PPP, was hilarious. Nothing made any sense and the review that day was awesome fun.

That was also the year of the second Naked Hatted Avatar Week which crossed over into TTTNE with one very memorable incident involving the Pebble that Hides and a labrador. But that's a totally separate story (NHAW detailed under the link above). We also had that nasty incident with the tentacle p0rn stories posted by some Gen Chatters that infiltrated TTTNE. That seemed like something of a coming of age prank to be honest, just a bit of fun but for some people the scars are still there.

A young girl named Ned Stark Fan came into TTTNE for a while and became appalled that Lany Cassandra flirted with people in this thread because NSF considered her to be "old". This did not go down well and NSF eventually left us alone. Lany was also involved in another incident involving "he who shall not be named" but for the sake of this history I shall name him - Rogue Warrior. Unknown to Lany RW was a pest sending unsolicited PMs to female members of the board. Lany invited him to TTTNE and to TriNocCon where GRRM was a guest. RW was a real asshole and caused many unspeakable problems like a fight that nearly broke out in a room party. They tried to hide RW away from George but he knew what was going on. All these incidents prompted us to clean things up around here and all the sex talk and flirting became a thing of the past. In one Smurf themed thread we attempted not to swear and started saying things like "oh you smurfing smurf!".

Much to the despair of everyone the spam reviews came to an end after I was made redundant from my job at the local newspaper at the end of 2008. My job there had not involved much work hence the masses of free time on my hands to compile the review on an almost daily basis over the last year and a half. But suddenly I had to go get a job where they actually expect you to work and sadly nobody since has stepped up to attempt such a crazy thing again. About half way through the run of spam reviews I started saving them and an archive of those reviews is available on my website here: Spam Review Archive. If only I had thought to do that from the start there would be some great stuff included but it is all lost now.

It was right around that time that Space Bandito asked the mods for special permission to have one TTTNE threadlet go on for 10,000 posts. It was just like the good old days with one huge thread. Sadly I don't have much to say about that thread because this was during my absence from the board while I spent five glorious months out of work and mostly playing computer games while living off my nice redundancy package. Ah what bliss.

TTTNE has seen much less turbulent times the last few years under the rule of Pebble in 2009, Blue Rose and Silverstar as joint rulers in 2010 with their Rainbow Court, and BenIowa in 2011 with his Librarian Court which ruled during the fl00b. And now in 2012 under the rule of the Witches Three, Lany Cassandra, Salome Sand Witch and Mlle Zabzie, TTTNE continues as a friendly spam filled part of the board, a kind of slow chat, welcoming of all.

By my reckoning The Thread That Never Ends has racked up approx. 380,000 posts over it's seven year history. What is spam can never die but rise up stronger and spammier than before.