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100,000,000

I

ironcreed

Banned
The-Best-View4.jpg


A long way to climb for sure.
 
D

DeadlyParasite

Member
Great respect for your ongoing decision to not sell-out the website. It's very nice to be able to visit the site knowing nothing drastic will change and I hope it continues to stay that way.

Here's to another 100,000,000.
 
D

Dupy

"it is in giving that we receive"
Can't believe I've been (mostly) lurking for 10+ years. Love this place.

Congrats!
 
Chittagong

Chittagong

Gold Member
Congrats NeoGAF, and thanks EviLore & all the mods! I appreciate how much work keeping a community great is, and GAF is truly the greatest.

I joined in 2002 at 23 years old, and rejoined after the big crash, and I've been on GAF pretty much every day I haven't been in DPRK. In fact, I am now posting this from a small guesthouse in Karakol, Kyrgystan, at 36 years old.

GAF introduced me to amazing, obscure games I would never have discovered myself, like Ikaruga, Ossu Takae Ouendan and Persona 4. GAF helped me lose weight and start fasting. I learned from GAF that the big barbell lifts are the way to get swole. GAF introduced me to an obscure but amazing headphone amp brand called Schiit (really).

So what's my contribution to society? I thought I'd look back at my time here:

For cleaner homes
My original Finland setup 2006
London setup #1 in 2008
London setup # 2 not pictured, it was underwhelming
London setup #3 in 2016
London setup #4 (work in progress)

"wtf are you smoking" threads
PS3 is going to be expensive (yup)
Revolution (=Wii) will be weak (yup)
Xbox 360 will focus on motion controls (hit & miss)
Wii successor will have 360 tier tech (yup)
Apps on Apple TV will change everything (lol)
Sony will do a new PSVR SKU (yup, even more radically than I predicted)
Why it is time for Microsoft to sell Xbox division to Nintendo (locked)

Overpriced hardware fan club
Alienware X51 OT
Analogue NT OT

Awesome travel destinations
North Korea (DPRK) tourism |OT| - surreal, beautiful, friendly
Chernobyl tourism |OT| Soviet Union's carbon neutral sanctuary for wildlife

Christmas giveaway
Last Christmas I decided to give away my remaining physical gaming collection to GAFers who'd enjoy the games once more. Couldn't be happier I did it, and hope someone continues the tradition.

Disciplinary record
Pretty amazing I haven't been banned more, or juniored over the years. I've been only banned once, for pasting a link to a website showing Lindsay Lohan's tits. Seeing how she turned out after, I consider it taking one for the team.

So, for all the good times, thank you EviLore, thanks mods, thanks GAF!
 
P

PapaJustify

Member
What an achievement. Congratulations to 100,000,000 posts!

Edit: btw, did you send out a press release? I would to read about it on Kotaku.
 
C

ChrisD

Member
That's a lot of posts, and they all contributed to this wonderful forum which has eaten a lot of my time. I hatelove all of you, and I lovehate NeoGAF as a whole the most. <3
 
B

B_Bech

Member
Honored to be a part of what will always be the greatest gaming site of all time.

Other than Polygon, of course.
 
P

pixelpatch

Junior Member
EviLore said:
stEV1jk.jpg


Today NeoGAF hit 100 million posts.

It's been a long road. In May 2004, the final nomadic precursor to NeoGAF died suddenly from database corruption. As hobbyist admins using a black box server provided by a soon-to-be-defunct corporation, we lacked any actual shell access and weren't capable of performing any backups along the way, so everything was lost outright in an instant. On woefully underpowered hardware, the site had been crashing any time any news of significance hit, eventually down more than up. The ads placed by the corporation in exchange for the server were awful, pop-up ridden, and malware-infested. The already tiny userbase stagnated and declined, and we were all pretty damned fatigued by the time it fell apart completely in that moment.

I was 19, then, steering the ship for a couple years though very much in a collaborative effort. When it crashed and burned, this group of passionate folks who had volunteered so much time and effort for the sake of their community simultaneously sighed and slumped their shoulders and didn't see much of a course ahead. I had $0 in the bank to wave any magic wands. Forums died all the time, rarely ever stayed solvent, and usually pre-planned migrations had to happen to keep communities intact, otherwise people would spread out across the internet and find new homes and not look back after a week or two. Things looked pretty grim.

As the annoying asshole kid somehow telling a bunch of smart, capable adults what to do, however the hell I had managed to swing that, I didn't want to see the community I joined back at 14 pass into the wind. But, with no SSH access, and no control over the domain, even, and no response from the corporate end, we didn't even have a way to tell people what had happened. Dead site, dead silence.

So I figured it out as I went along, and didn't sleep until it was done. I couldn't exactly Tweet everyone about a Kickstarter in 2004, as it turned out.

No money to work with and no desire for another shitty corporate overlord ever again. I set up a Paypal account. Then I contacted Jim, the guy in charge of Gaming-Age who hosted the community back in '99 and still had some ties, and asked him for a favor: could he put up an article with an explanation I gave him and a link to a particular url? The link was my personal domain, where I wrote a little message to the people from my dead community who would happen to find it, in magnificent markup that probably looked extremely close to <html> <body> text <br><br> text </body></html>, white background and all. Went something like this:

Here's a Paypal link. I can't promise any outcomes at all or offer you anything in return. Sounds great so far, right? I'd post the Heath Ledger setting-money-on-fire image if that movie actually existed yet. But. If enough money gets dropped into that link for me to make it happen, I'll do my best to establish and run a new home for the community: a permanent, self-sustainable home, with a server good enough to not die every other breath, and without godawful malware ads infesting every page. I'll do what I can, if you trust me to. -EL

At the dawn of June 2004, I succeeded with the least(most?)-impressive-in-retrospect hilariously jank proto-crowdfunding campaign ever, and raised a whopping $2000 from a group of generous newly-former members, considering that my plaintext proposal and Paypal link on a random domain set to a blank background would make the most suspicious present-day GoFundMe campaign look like a great idea to mortgage your home on. Server and software bought, though. Avengers assembled. Policies written. Templates carved out. Light switch flipped.

$2000 ain't exactly VC money, but $2000 on Paypal can make a lot more happen than $0 in your bank account. $2000 in the hands of a stubborn, determined, negasonic teenage asshole can apparently make the biggest video game forum in the world happen. Today's 100 millionth post is matched by over 100 million pageviews a month and millions of visitors from every country on the map. But let's pause storytime, shelve any self-aggrandizement, and give credit where credit's really due.

To the people who were crazy enough to Paypal me coinage in the name of semi-benevolent dictatorship, even though you knew full well you'd probably end up getting permanently banned for one reason or another -- probably by me, too -- definitely by me, in some cases, since I'd see the "what the fuck, dude, I sent you ten bucks, doesn't that give me ban immunity" emails afterwards: take a bow for crowdfunding this adventure, if any of you are still around. I see enough OGs floating about that there have to be a few of you.

To Hitokage -- Brett -- for having my back and giving me advice and telling me when I was screwing up, co-founding the site, and being a dear friend: thanks, and rest in peace, buddy.

Thanks as well to maharg, iapetus (still with us!), and Wasabiking, for stepping up and helping get the site operational and for your contributions in the years beyond, and Shouta (also still with us!) for never dropping the u.

Thanks to the other mods and admins from that era who came along for the ride, too, all of whom have retired or been fired in the 12 years since, haha, aside from -- and don't any of you fucking forget it -- the unstoppable, ban-gifs-made-in-his-image-have-donned-the-front-page-of-Reddit, bishoptl.

To the new guard: gromph DJing the servers, stump and quin and niro and cyan as your objective superiors, m0dus on art, timan on design, my bestie on account approvals, aeana, besada, chichi, christine, CJ, cornballer, fucktroll, crushed^H^H^H^H^H^HEmCeeGramr, not-the-shitty-other-faceless, falk, funky, ghaleon, gotchaye, hyoushi, jshackles, kab, kagari, mandrake, Mike, minsc, MB, robo, seda, shinra, not-steve oldblood, stooge, stupei, tre', TDM, tim, XANDER, xia, kev, and zel on moderation, you're all the superglue to my tasty paste for the stubborn set of ideals that is NeoGAF.

Here we are, 12 years later, 17 years into my GAF adventure, 100 million posts and counting. Still independent. Still growing. Just me and my crew, and you. Thousands of times bigger, but same philosophy. Keep the thing free to read and free to use, but hard to get into and easy to get kicked out of. Stay clean and minimalist. Have standards. Don't let insular echo chambers form; "let them fight." But do it right, and focus on evidence-based debate.

Fuck corporate acquisition. Onward at the helm into the horizon. To #NoDRM. To contributions to society. To being Against. To 217. To wine coolers. To crazy buttocks. To Gahiggidy's basement. To alllllllll the SunhiLegend gifs. To NeoGAF Game of the Year 2015: The Witcher 3. To Zelda <3 Chinner. To shooting yourself in the foot. To Megaton, to Wednesdayton, and forever believing.

To the next 100 million. Cheers.

~Tyler
Click to expand...

MASSIVE CONGRATS!
 
d00d3n

d00d3n

Member
EviLore said:
*snip*
Fuck corporate acquisition. Onward at the helm into the horizon.
*snip*
To the next 100 million. Cheers.

~Tyler
Click to expand...

I really appreciate the bolded words. The place wouldn't be the same if run by a big corporation. I can only imagine what kind of insane offers you must have passed up over the years.
 
H

HylianHero12

Member
Congratulations and thank you to EviLore, the admins/staff, and the rest of the community. That is one impressive milestone. The story in the OP is really inspiring as well. Thanks for persevering.
 
F

forknknife

Banned
Congrats everyone!

Hope that gaf stays the way it is as long as possible although I think I could use a gaf app that would enable us to better keep track of our posts, replies, etc.
 
J

Jumplion

Member
This place is neat. Took me a month to get approved to first post here, but it was worth it. I've had some good conversations and debates on NeoGAF, and hopefully I'll have more in the future.

You done did good NeoGAF.
 
R

Revven

Member
Congrats to GAF and all of us! This has been my go-to forum since I was lurking (before my account got activated) in 2012, I think. It's always been wonderful to be here and have serious but thoughtful discussions.
 
A

ATOMICJORGE

Member
Congratulations to all the staff, since 2012 I have been a lurker like some people like to say of the site and I always wanted to be part of it when my account was accepted on September of 2015 I was very happy, I'm very proud to be a member of this beautiful forum

VIVA NEOGAF!
 
A

A Human Becoming

More than a Member
Happy 100 mil! Thanks for the nice write-up and managing to keep NeoGAF going the way it has. Been here nine years and never thought of leaving.
 
ZAMtendo

ZAMtendo

Obliterating everything that's not your friend
I'm so proud to be a part of this wonderful gaming community. And a huge congratulations to you. NeoGAF has helped me to enjoy and be a part of videogame culture like I would have never imagined (Animal Crossing: New Leaf community anyone?). Thanks to the community I have enjoyed AC:NL hundred-fold and made many wonderful cyber-accomplices. And I've used my experiences to write an essay in my videogame design and culture Masters degree which I received a few years back. And it's all thanks to you EvilLore.

THANK YOU and here's to a bright future :)

Edit: 1000th post :D
 
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