Tribalwar
Tribalwar, often abbreviated to "TW" is an Internet forum which grew up around the Tribes video game series. Tribalwar is currently ranked 56th most posted-on message board by big-boards.com with over 5 million posts and roughly 20,000 members (including "smurfs"). It was, for a long time, one of the largest forums on the World Wide Web due to its early web presence before such things gained widespread popularity.
Started on December 6, 1999 by Anthony 'Rayn' Maio with co-horts Jon 'Ratorasniki' Naiman & Johnny 'Imposter' Titus, very little of the site currently bearing the name 'Tribalwar' remains the same today as it was in TW's infancy. Under the steady hand of its remaining staff, TW has expanded to the point of almost excluding the game series that it was formed around and now strives to provide a vehicle for comedy and procrastination through its forums to a more general audience.
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Historic Events
Tribalwar's Exploits on the Web: Fads and Fame
Tribalwar lays claim to popularising the phenomenal internet meme All Your Base Are Belong To Us which started simultaneously across any number of Internet hotspots including Something Awful. The forums' other major exfiltration into the rest of the web involved afflicting roughly 300,000 CNN readers with a modified form of the "goatse" image. The opportunity to do so arose by chance after an still image captured from film of the September 11th terrorist attacks was hosted on TW citing an image of the devil in the clouds of smoke in the aftermath of the tragedy. The image rapidly accrued links from all over the web as e-mail forwards and articles popped across the web – the problem being that all these news sites and forwarders had hot linked the image directly from the TW servers. The article was syndicated, which resulted in even CNN featuring the image in an article and hotlinking it. Anthony 'Rayn' Maio, administrator of Tribalwar responsible for changing the image to that of "goatse" claimed he was left no choice by CNN who had placed an inexorable burden upon TW servers by hotlinking the image. The article was adjusted by CNN soon after its readers were "goatse'd" to remove the image, but not until (by Tribalwar's accounts) the image had received roughly 300,000 "hits" from visitors to CNN.com. A valuable lesson was learned by the Internet that fateful day, and Anthony 'Rayn' Maio went on to receive several thousand letters of hatemail.
Flash Animation
Forum user "Musashi" has been widely extolled by fellow members for his Flash animative contributions to Tribalwar. Musashi's most popular work saw Tribalwar "put on the map" once more: a parody of Mel Gibson's The_Passion_of_the_Christ, which was re-worked into the space of a few minutes to a frivolous mambo tune, frightfully exaggerated in gore and incriminating of anti-semitism on Gibson's behalf with a cartoon Rabbi figure blatantly applauding (indeed, cheerleading) Jesus Christ's flagellation and crucifiction. The film was linked to within a section of the Guardian Online, greatly augmenting its exposure. It can still be watched at [1].
Musashi was also responsible for creating a popular 'Dean-Kitty' photomontage, similarly proliferated online and archived at [2].
Internal Events
Historically Tribalwar is one of the few forums with a very lax moderation policy in efforts to allow the community to decide for itself how it would like to be run. This exceptionally liberal moderation system coupled with the commonplace irreverance and vulgarity about TW's collective sense of humour has resulted in many entertaining anecdotes (spread amongst years of fruitless garbage) upon TW's message boards and IRC channel. A few of these events are listed below, but many of TW's momentous threads are being gathered in an effort to comprehensively chronicle the community's enduring memories at the Tribalwar.com Forums Hall of Fame.
Chairgate
In 2004 then-administrator of Tribalwar.com "Colosus" elected to sit his portly self upon a chair, which thereafter broke in front of many members of the Tribes community who had elected to watch Colosus and others sit via an internet video link. The incident was instantly, and somewhat ironically dubbed "Chairgate" in the convention of suffixing embarassing scandals with "gate" since President Nixon's involvement with Watergate, despite a self-evident lack of conspiracy about the incident on Colosus' part. The events were widely broadcast and intermittently recounted several times across TW IRC and message boards. Some of TW's members expressed pleasure at the incident, which was in their view just desserts for Colosus' alleged fraudelent conduct involving a "Labtop".
Labtop incident
Few, if any persons at all would be able to disclose information as to the design or function of a "Labtop". However the precious information on it has been widely propagated: it is most certainly valuable, and was purchased by "Colosus" with money that may or may not have been fraudulently extracted from philanthropic members of TW upon contended pretenses of supporting server maintenance. Some of this money may or may not have also been spent aeroplane tickets, champagne cocktails and furry costumes for WorldCon. Years later, in 2005, Colosus began repaying this debt in hopes of eliminating a lifetime of shame.