The TFD Thread

Description

If there would be any forum records kept on the Planetarion Forums, the TFD thread would win many of them. It was the largest, longest-running, most controversial and most rule-breaking thread ever to have been placed on the forums, and may even have wielded the power to elect moderators.

History

It started during Round 1, when an unknown forum poster apparently named Henk made his first and only post ever on the Alliance forums, entitled !_=-FryingDutch.net-=_!, unknowing of how legendary his post would become. It was a post in Dutch, which praised the alliance TFD, encouraging other dutch players to join. The thread received a number of replies as threads generally do, until two other dutch players, Lyon and Basal started using the thread for more conversational purposes, pushing the post count up rapidly. Normally, such threads would be closed upon moderator intervention, but it so happened that forum moderator MikeUK took a liking to the thread or it's posters, and happily joined in on the conversation as far as he could follow it, not speaking any Dutch.

The TFD Thread did finally appear to die out, when it received competition from two other threads of considerable size, namely the The Collective and the Do Battleships have toilets? threads. With interest in the TFD thread waning, and the "TC thread" having a far larger amount of active posters, the latter took over the crown of longest post on the Planetarion Forums. By this time, MikeUK had resigned as a moderator, and was succeeded by the dutch Shadow1980.

However, the TFD thread was soon after "rediscovered" by a new group of dutch posters, mainly mpr0733, HRS, and Zapman, who brought the thread back to the front pages of the forum as a recreational topic. They were soon joined by fellow dutchman Leshy, and with both the TC and Battleship Toilet-threads being closed, they quickly returned the TFD thread to its former status as largest thread. With a Dutch moderator on the forum, the thread again managed to avoid closure.

The aim of the posters by then had become to achieve the 10.000 post mark, setting it well ahead of the other two mentioned threads, which had both been closed before even making the 3.000 mark. Containing very little of actual value, and frequently being used to play "thread tag", a process in which two posters would reply to each other and "tag" each other on IRC after doing so, the thread was continually being spammed to achieve this goal. But then, with less than 100 posts to go, disaster struck.

Forum administrator and Planetarion Creator Fudge decided to clean the forum database in an attempt to speed up the forums, and purged all old posts. Both all records of Planetarion's earliest rounds and the first 6200 posts of the TFD thread - which did survive the purge - disappeared forever. A major blow to the morale of the posters, but they were not to be undone. The 10.000 post mark was still their goal.

However, a second stroke of bad luck befell the TFD thread. Shadow1980 retired as a forum moderator, and decided that his final act as TFD thread guardian should be to close it, considering no other dutch-speaking moderators were left to watch over the thread. The new forum administrator JammyJim, however, accepted the pleas of the four posters in the TFD thread, and reopened it. Not long after, Leshy was promoted to forum moderator on Planetarion Discussions, the forum on which the TFD thread resided by then.

The posting immediately continued, and over the course of many months, the thread grew again, until the 10.000th post was finally made by a shared FryingDutch.net forum account. With Round 10 approaching, and a new version of vBulletin, the forum software used for the Planetarion Forums, due out, the posters in a coordinated decision decided to retire the thread definitely, and requested it's deletion. The procedure was carried out by forums technician Karmulian, as it had to be done at database-level. The forums were down for several hours following the thread's deletion.

The Controversy

The TFD Thread was very controversial, for one main reason. It was nearly entirely in Dutch, save for a few posts from people randomly wandering in and the replies to their posts. On several occasions complaints were sent in and voiced, because it broke the forums' English-only rule. However, under the protection of forum moderators and admins alike, these were not frequently taken notice of.

There has been one major exception in the history of the thread. At one point, a complaint was voiced on the forum itself, which snowballed into a thread with many complaints, leading to the closure of the TFD thread by one of the moderators. Subsequently, a forum poll was held, asking the regular posters to decide the fate of the TFD thread. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, a vast, but until then silent, majority came to the thread's defense, and claimed it to be part of the forum heritage. Forum admin and PA Creator Zeus personally exempted the thread from the language rule, on the basis that the thread itself predated that rule.