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The blog post is up! Thanks for your help.

On October 6th, 2010, gaming.stackexchange.com graduated from beta status! In celebration of the 2 year anniversary of this date, I'm working on a "year in review" blog post.

I'm going to hit all the highlights - the major events, skyrim, arqade, etc. However, I know I don't know all the cool stuff that went on this past year, (I haven't been paying attention 24/7 in chat, comments, minecraft, youtube, twitter, let's play, etc) and so I'd like your input.

What happened this year that was awesome or silly or fun that deserves recognition?

Here's some quick guidelines:

  • This is going to be "year in review" style, so feel free to make up awards (Wipqozn's award for most awesome turtle pic, etc) or just give an anecdote, or whatever in between.
  • Let's keep it positive - so let's not honor bad behavior or trolling, etc. Also, let's try not to be mean to other people unless they're OK with being the butt of the joke :P
  • Try to keep it relatively short, a paragraph or so. I'd like to include a bunch of different things from different sources. However, if you'd like to write a longer article for the blog, we can probably work something out!
  • I'll also accept art, or art help. I suck at art. Seriously, you don't want me to art you again.

I'll be publishing the article on October 6th (assuming no wrinkles surface) so you have until then to submit your anecdote/thought/award/whatever. I'll include as many as I can, and I'll try to give preferential treatment to highly upvoted submissions.

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  • 2
    Isn't it positive that we now have our first recurring troll, traveling backwards in times with its robotic implants?
    – badp
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 14:52
  • Also do any blog posts on Arqade involve time traveling robots?
    – Zelda
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 15:22
  • Do you want to have stuff that happened almost entirely in chat? I'm thinking of back in February, when several of us got pony avatars and went a little crazy posting ponies in chat.
    – murgatroid99
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 16:01
  • @badp he wasn't pro much. That's the standard by which we judge our trolls around here.
    – agent86
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 16:43
  • @murgatroid99, stuff that happened almost entirely in chat (or on another arqade community spot) is well within what I'm looking for.
    – agent86
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 16:58
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    Everyone loves Magic cards
    – user9983
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 20:30
  • 3
    Of course you post this when I don't have the time to compose a proper murder ballad. That said, we need a murder ballad to tell the tale of the murder of murder at the hands of The Coward Grace Note.
    – LessPop_MoreFizz
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 22:18
  • I, for one, highly support the idea of a Wipqozn Award for most awesome turtle pic.
    – Wipqozn Mod
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 23:38
  • Are we only going for events since January 1, or are we going until last Octoberish?
    – Dave McClelland
    Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 21:02
  • @DaveMcClelland, I'm including stuff that happened since the last anniversary, so anything from Oct. 6th 2011 -> Oct 6th 2012 is fair game.
    – agent86
    Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 21:32
  • @desaivv, hah, you caught me :) I honestly didn't think anyone would notice. I also felt weird writing a blog post about how awesome I am. Therefore, I left myself out, as much as possible.
    – agent86
    Commented Oct 8, 2012 at 14:51
  • @desaivv, d'aww, thanks :) Hope you enjoyed the blog post and thanks for the support :)
    – agent86
    Commented Oct 8, 2012 at 15:23

8 Answers 8

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I'm quite surprised everyone's missed a rather big one: we changed our name!

Other things that haven't been mentioned:

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  • 1
    +1, These are the most important milestones we reached in the past year, really.
    – GnomeSlice
    Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 13:50
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    @GnomeSlice That's a very subjective comment.
    – Niro
    Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 14:14
  • +1 for a serious post that actually addresses some of our main achievements!
    – fredley
    Commented Oct 2, 2012 at 9:02
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I have a few suggestions, which I'll list in no particular order.

  • Lazers.

  • Discuss some of the memes that have come and gone over the years. Discussing all of them would take up too much space, but touching on some of the major ones would be a good idea.

  • Lazers.

  • The events and promotions that have happened over the past year, and the growth of the site in general (including the renaming).

  • Lazers.

  • Assuming someone has the skill and tools to make one, and is also willing to take the time (cough @RonanForman cough), a short montage video of some of the awesome things that have happened over the course of Arqade's lifetime would be a really nice way to round off the blog post.

  • Lazers.

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    +1 for lazers!!
    – l I
    Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 1:44
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    I think you forgot Lazers.
    – Kappei
    Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 14:35
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questions were banned from the site. Depending on your point of view, there was either much rejoicing, or it was if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Or maybe there was much rejoicing because a million voices were suddenly silenced.

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  • I was going to go grab a link for this, then remembered that there were approximately 1000 discussions on the subject
    – Dave McClelland
    Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 20:47
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    It was fun for me to mass delete them... oh, good times
    – juan
    Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 21:04
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I suppose it's worth mentioning the fantastic support from all the people here at Arqade during this year's Mario Marathon. We started off at #1 before the event even started.

We held the number one spot for the first day (or two) of the event, and we still stayed strong at the end, finishing at number five in the Top Contributors.

Also, as Wipqozn stated, we were still in the lead for average donations per user!

Additionally, we've made extremely good progress on tag clean-up!

And let's not forget: spugly pls

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    It's worth noting that we still come in first for highest average donation per user.
    – Wipqozn Mod
    Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 0:13
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In mid January, Tristan (now known as Fluttershy) changed his gravatar to a picture of Fluttershy and Wipqozn revealed that he, too, was a brony. Within a few days, he and I (murgatroid99) followed suit with pony avatars (Applejack and Twilight Sparkle, respectively). Ashley Nunn eventually started watching and joined us with a Rainbow Dash avatar, and later a Derpy Hooves avatar. In our excitement we flooded chat with pony pictures several times (examples here and here), to the chagrin of others who did not share our enthusiasm for the show. There was a bit of drama over posting pony pictures in the chat, and especially one-boxing them and posting a lot at once, but it eventually blew over. Now a couple of us still have My Little Pony related avatars, and we link to MLP content infrequently enough that people rarely express annoyance about it, though apparently some are just annoyed and silent.

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  • Every time my 3 year old sees my Dragonvale park she says "I want to go to @Fluttershy 's park." Heh...
    – EBongo
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 22:15
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    We rarely express annoyance because all it would do is keep you people on the subject longer. But, for the sake of a fact check: this is still insufferable and I hate you all.
    – LessPop_MoreFizz
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 22:16
  • @LessPop_MoreFizz OK. What I said is consistent with your comment. This isn't really the time or place for an argument about this, so I won't.
    – murgatroid99
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 22:29
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    Count me in for "infrequent enough that I don't mind it anymore." :)
    – badp
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 22:40
  • Yep. Started as RD, then was Derpy for a while.
    – user11502
    Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 22:46
  • What is a Brony? (I know it, but isn't the idea behind SE that we make it easy to search in google? ;) ).
    – Ids
    Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 17:41
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    I'm sorry, what? I wrote this post to describe an event in the community, not describe a cultural phenomenon. And that argument really only applies to our actual Q&A topic.
    – murgatroid99
    Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 20:18
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    Out of curiosity, are people downvoting because of something about the story or for some other reason?
    – murgatroid99
    Commented Oct 2, 2012 at 14:33
  • 2
    @murgatroid99 Wild Guess: It has something to do with the number of upvotes my comment received.
    – LessPop_MoreFizz
    Commented Oct 4, 2012 at 17:50
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Shameless Self-Promotion

I wrote poetry.

Other Cool Stuff I Remember

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We quickly ravaged the Kingdoms of Amalur followed shortly after by a huge give away with the Mass Effect 3 launch. The subsequent launch of Diablo 3 meant that the front page of the site was swamped for months!! :)

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    Not to mention Skyrim vs. MW3 about a year ago.
    – MBraedley
    Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 20:16
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    Skyrim vs. MW3 was a year ago? Crikey.
    – tombull89
    Commented Oct 2, 2012 at 14:41
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I haven't actually got it yet, but there was a giveaway of Arqade swag for everyone in the first 5 pages for rep; iirc for the first time ever.

The Diablo III event was the first time that all qualifying participants got a prize, and also the first time that this prize (t-shirt) had the new name & logo on it.

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    This is actually the second time Top User swag was sent out, this was the first, though the first was for the top 2 pages and this was for the top 5.
    – FAE
    Commented Oct 3, 2012 at 0:34

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