Tribalwar
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TribalWar, often abbreviated to TW, is an Internet forum that grew up around the Tribes video game series. TribalWar is the 80th most popular message board (ranked by number of posts) according to [big-boards.com], with just over seven million posts and approximately 22,000 members (including "smurfs"). It was, for a long time, one of the largest forums on the World Wide Web, owing to being on the web before such things gained widespread popularity.
Started on December 6, 1999, by Anthony "Rayn" Maio with cohorts Jon "Ratorasniki" Naiman and Johnny "Imposter" Titus, very little of what characterized the site in its infancy remains today. Under the steady hand of the remaining staff, TW has expanded to the point of almost excluding the game series it was formed around, and now serves primarily as a vehicle for comedy and procrastination to a more general audience.
TribalWar's Exploits on the Web: Fads and Fame
TribalWar lays claim to popularizing the phenomenal Internet meme All your base are belong to us[#endnote_AYB] which started simultaneously across any number of Internet hotspots including Something Awful. The forum's other major infiltration into the rest of the web involved afflicting roughly 300,000 CNN readers with a modified form of the "goatse" image.[#endnote_CNN] The opportunity to do so arose by chance after a still image captured from film of the September 11th terrorist attacks was hosted on TW, claiming that the devil's likeness was visible in the clouds of smoke billowing from the towers. The image rapidly accrued direct links from around the world as e-mail forwards and articles spread like wildfire across the web - the problem in this being that all the news sites and forwarders had hot linked the image directly from the TW servers. The article in question had originated from a syndicated wire source, which subsequently resulted in the hotlinking of the accompanying image on the websites of the world's largest news networks, including CNN. Anthony 'Rayn' Maio, the TribalWar administrator responsible for switching the image to that of "goatse," claimed he was left no alternative by CNN and others 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 (according to TribalWar server logs) 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 Macromedia Flash animated 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 crucifixion. The film was linked to within a section of the Guardian Online, greatly augmenting its exposure. It can still be watched at [link].
Musashi was also responsible for creating a popular 'Dean-Kitty' photomontage, similarly proliferated online and archived at [link].
Internal Events
Historically, TribalWar has had a fairly lax moderation policy, allowing users to speak their mind freely. Due to some incidents with trolling and spam, the moderation has increased much more than before, with trolling, posting of not work safe material, and the like, usually being caught and dealt with very quickly when required. In an effort to curb potentially annoying posts by new members, anyone registering has to wait a specific amount of time before they are allowed to post, in order for new users to read and acclimate themselves with how the forum works. This waiting period has changed numerous times in the last few years, anywhere from 3 months, to 14 days in length. 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 embarrassing 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 deserts for Colosus' alleged fraudulent conduct involving a "Labtop."
Labtop incident
Few, if any, would be able to disclose information on the design or function of a "Labtop." However, some precious information on it has been widely propagated: it is most certainly valuable, and it 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 on airplane 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. This event later led to the Church of Mountain Dew in which Colosus, after receiving threatening letters from a lawyer regarding taking donation money from a nonprofit and buying a "labtop," declared Tribalwar a church dedicated to Mountain Dew and became Cardinal DeWald.
TribalWar Cliches
TribalWar, like any other forum populated with less-than-mature individuals, has any number of crass cliches. A few are listed here.1999 Q0WNED, STFU this si libary
2000 First, Reserved
2001 Pics or it didn't happen
2002 Maori Guy
2005 ORLY? Owl
2006 Telephone
External Events
Many LAN parties involving the TribalWar community took place while Tribes was popular. These were all user-created and company-sponsored events.TribesCon TribesCon was a west-coast based LAN party for Tribes fans which was well attended by TW people. It got started in 1999 and ran through four iterations until 2003, its final year. Attendance peaked in 2002 at about 250 people.
TribesCamp Organized and sponsored by a particularly unliked member of the Tribes community, this one-year event took place in St. Louis and was poorly attended.
TribesGala 2000 Marketed as a LAN party, and manifesting as a press circus, this one-time LAN party was popularized by the presence of many TribalWar personalities and the attendance of the Tribes 2 development team. One notable event was an individual disconnecting and running off with one of the demo systems for the then-unfinished Tribes 2 game. The system was recovered and the thief caught.
UVALAN Undisputably the most successful of the Tribes LAN parties, this is the primary gathering for TribalWar denizens. Beginning in February 2000, this event is held annually in Chantilly, Virginia, every summer. The event started at the Doubletree hotel in Charlottesville - the site of the first two events in 2000 - but due to rapid growth in attendance, moved to the more centrally located and larger venue of the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly. The series of events will come to a close in August 2006 with UVALAN 8.
Tribal Wars During the marketing push for the Tribes:Vengeance game, the UVALAN organizers put aside the UVALAN name for one year and held Tribal Wars 2004. The event replaced both UVALAN and TribesCon, the two largest LAN parties for Tribes players and TribalWar denizens, and was attended by over 500 people split between an East Coast (Chantilly, VA) location and a West Coast (Los Angeles, CA) location. The event was a "who's-who" of both the competitive Tribes community and the TribalWar forum.
Notes and References
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External links
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