test

[Zeke]

test

[e of pi]

Wow! Birthdays indicator and a rollover of the first post and last post in a thread! Coool!

[Zeke]

Sorry, but I've removed the rollovers ("tooltips," actually). They were making the forum load much, much slower. All I really wanted from that mod was the extra field for topic description, which is of historical significance here. Ask someone who remembers Topic Title.

[e of pi]

Umm, Zeke? What was Topic Title? There. I have. Could someone answer?

[Zeke]

The reason I said to ask someone else is that I'm busy installing mods. Fine, I'll be more specific: Ask Sa'ar.

[e of pi]

Is he on?

[e of pi]

Is he on? Thus I ask you.

[KillerGodMan]

*raises hand* me too?

is it similar to one-by-one story?

[PointyHairedJedi]

Pull up a pew, young 'uns, and let Ole' Pappy Jedi tell you about a crazy time that we'll never see the like of again.

Once upon a time, way back when, a crazy young fella by the name of SimonBob (who is still to be found lurking on LiveJournal to this day, I might add) decided it would be fun to post a what might be termed a meta-thread which obeyed all the forms of a post but had no actual content other than a description of itself. Putting it like that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, so let me show you something along the lines of what he posted:

Topic Title

Post content.

Signature.

It quickly degnerated into posters into merely talking in the third person, but still it proved incredibly popular. It ran, and ran, and more than a hundred pages later Zeke finally stepped in after the thread started causing the board to creak (as it showed no sign of slowing down on its own). Shortly after came the boards' first accidental wiping, and though the body of Topic Title was lost to the ages, the legend still lives on.

It should be noticed that apart from a short memorial thread, no repeat of Topic Title has since been permitted - much like TrekBBS' Longest Thread Ever, it was one of those things that you had to be there for, and any attempt to recreate it would just seem like so much cheap spam.

[PointyHairedJedi]

Oh, and I must say I like the new features Zeke, especially the long awaited return of user titles. For some reason though, when I look at the preview box doodad on the new posts screen I get this big grey expanse appearing on the left of the screen (using Opera, FYI).

EDIT: Do'h, having read the thread more carefully, I'm guessing that those aren't actually supposed to be there any more.

[Sa'ar Chasm]

Fine, I'll be more specific: Ask Sa'ar.

Hah? Who? What?

What Pointy said. Topic Title is before my time, actually. I didn't feel up to reading 83 pages of backtopic after I first joined the fora. I think I posted once or twice towards the end, coining the term "accordionisation" in the process.

[Scooter]

Originally Posted by e of pi

What was Topic Title?

The short version: Topic Title was a thread on an earlier version of the 5M board the consisted not on posts, but descriptions of posts. Example:

"Sarcastic comment about Enterprise continuity."

"Heated defense of Enterprise continuity, with snide comment concerning previous poster's unfortunate choice of footwear."

"Random invocation of Top Hat Man."

aaaand so on, forever.

[PointyHairedJedi]

I like to think that, in some dark alternate reality, Topic Title (suitably adorned with a goatee) is still going strong, and has in fact by this time consumed the rest of the Internet; eventually attaining sentience, the final epic struggle between its' content-free spamminess and the hyper-indexed order of Google will devastate the Earth and reduce what remains of humanity to living in caves who will, in ages to come, tell each other tales of two great and terrible gods waging eternal war across the very heavens themselves. Many further eons forward again, and man will have spread across those very heavens, and still the legend of Topic Title will be told, in some highly distorted but nonetheless recognisable form; they will long ago have stopped believing that it could have ever been true, of course, for what kind of strange and mythical place could have given birth to such a fantastical creation, and what manner of godly beings could have concieved of it?

What? It could happen.

[Gatac]

Expression of disbelief.

Gatac

[danieldoof]

whoah that must have been fun

mhmhmh....maybe I should google it...I could find a cached version of it somewhere huh?

[PointyHairedJedi]

I doubt it - it's been about three/four years (my memory is fuzzy as to exactly how long). The Wayback Machine doesn't cover much, as you can see (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://...eminute/forums).

Originally Posted by Gatac

Expression of disbelief.

:P

[Celeste]

Ahh... memories.

[danieldoof]

Originally Posted by PointyHairedJedi

I doubt it - it's been about three/four years (my memory is fuzzy as to exactly how long). The Wayback Machine doesn't cover much, as you can see (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://...eminute/forums).

its a shame that nobody rescued it :wink:

[PointyHairedJedi]

Going off on a wild tangent here (gosh!), I have the perfect compliment to your sig, Celeste.



The symmetry is just perfect.

EDIT:

Originally Posted by danieldoof

its a shame that nobody rescued it :wink:

Like I said, soon after it was locked, the board data was accidentally wiped (Owen was moving hardware or something). Everything up to that point was irretrieveably gone, unfortunately, though I seem to recall at the time one or two of us thought perhaps it was a conspiracy... :wink:

[Celeste]

Doggies need their teeth cleaned too!