What is TTTNE?
TTTNE stands for The Thread That Never Ends which is the name of the so-called "spam" thread on the Westeros Forum. TTTNE was started by the legendary OsRavan when the thread limit on total posts was removed and was a test to see just how many posts a single thread could take. Discussion primarily revolved around food (cheese, peanut butter, jello) and drink (beer), but the thread quickly turned into a race as it neared post 1000. The first 1k race was stolen by Kin Slayer Imp (now banned from Westeros) who won it with his first post in the thread saying "Did I get it?"
For a lot of people that was the end of it, but for a core group of friends TTTNE had become something more than just spam and nonsense. It had become a home on the Westeros Forum, a place where you can hang out and chat about anything and everything without judgement from others, without the fighting and arguments of Gen Chat and a friendly place where just about anyone is welcome. But TTTNE was not popular with the majority of General Chatters who felt that people were only posting to pad their post count numbers, but for those of us that posted in TTTNE we really could not care less about that. After many arguments and thread deletions Ran created a new part of the website called Forum Games where TTTNE, Mafia, fantasy football and other such games could exist with posts not counting towards post count totals.
This was the golden age of TTTNE where we finally had a single thread that would last forever, or so we thought, but when the thread reached over 20,000 posts it started to become problematic for Ran because it was causing the nightly board back-up process to take longer and longer each night. Ran kindly gave us advance notice that it was going to have to be closed and we came to an agreement that from then on threads would last for 1000 posts with the 1k winner being responsible for creating the next threadlet of TTTNE. And so after 23,020 posts the Great TTTNE thread was finally closed.
Since that time there have been 282 threadlets of TTTNE (as of 25 March 2010). One of them went to 10,000 posts by special permission. One was blown up by half way through. A couple of threads were merged together creating total chaos, and on one special day the 10 minute limit between posts was removed and everyone went crazy racking up over 3000 posts in 12 hours. By my estimate there have been a total of 330,000 posts in TTTNE history. The full recounting of this history would take far too long for me to sum up here.
What is MG's Almost Daily Spam Review?
But funnily enough summing up TTTNE was exactly what I was attempting to do with the spam review. It started as me simply quoting and replying to messages I found interesting while I was reading my way through the backlog of daily posts, which was on average about 500 per day during 2007. This was something most people did not have the time to do. During this time I was working for a local newspaper producing adverts using desktop publishing applications, but with the transition to digital media the work was disappearing and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. I had to be there 37.5 hours per week but was only doing maybe 17 or 18 hours of actual work, quite often much less. With the free time I had I began expanding on what I was doing with the quotes and replies, and thus the spam review was born.
Those people who could not read back would instead just read the spam review which condensed all the interesting bits into 2 or 3 very long posts. It became like a daily newspaper in style, or as I called it "almost daily" since at that time I had Thursday as my day off and did not work weekends either. From time to time several other people produced spam reviews when I was not around, including: Joanna Nox, Lany Cassandra, Quoth, Beniowa and the Pebble that Hides. But they did not really have the time to dedicate to the task and in December 2007 I found I no longer had the time for it either. I was offered redundancy from the newspaper and I took the money and ran. I had seen the writing on the wall more than a year before and had been studying website design. I used the money to pay off my loan for the training course and in May 2008, after five blissful months of unemployment I started work for Nature Publishing Group. Unfortunately they actually expect me to work for a living and thus the spam review is no more.
However, throughout 2007 I managed to save the majority of spam reviews that I was writing. At first this was just to ensure that I did not lose work when the board or my PC crashed. The spam review would usually take about 4 or 5 hours per day to produce and after a few accidents I began saving them to Text documents. As the months went by I realised that someday someone somewhere might actually be crazy enough to want to read these damned things and so I kept hold of them for the day when I could finally host them on a page very much like this one, a spam review archive.
Also collected here are some of posts from TTTNE history including my first post in the 23k Great TTTNE Thread and a subsequent post of introduction. There is also one short post which was the penultimate post in that Great Thread, sadly for me DJ Dawn managed to grab the very last one with something rather less memorable. Also I discovered that I have TTTNE threadlet 88 saved with the spam reviews for some strange reason, but it means I can present it here in text and html format. To bring things right up to date there is also a document listing the 2010 Rainbow Spam Court assignments.
