The History of the Fora Augusta

1) FOUNDING (May 19, 2002)

The Fora Augusta was founded on May 19, 2002 by a 17-year-old in Maryland screennamed Princeps Augustus. The name, simply the Latin translation of "Augustus' Forums," was chosen because these were effectively his personal boards. Having been banned from Goth.net and the New Gothic Message Boards over a theology debate, he wished to keep in touch with some of his comrades from those places.

So the Fora Augusta was founded initially as a "Christian Gothic philosophy" forum, although discussion certainly wasn't limited to those topics. It was established with three forums: Areopagus, where all politics, philosophy and theology was to be discussed; Agora, a general topics forum; and Lyceum, the music/creativity forum.

At first, the main posters were Princeps Augustus, sistersandy, and some other posters from Goth.net-namely Archannus, Misantropica, and Nyarlethotep. xpacifistx, another early poster, came from the Payable On Death boards, where Princeps was then a member.

The Fora was largely peaceful, although some vitriol remained from the Goth.net/NGMB feud. While there were no active flamewars between the boards, both sides did their share of smearing the other. An incident involving Archannus' repeated banning from the NGMB provided the occasion for fences to finally be mended.


2) THE FALL OF STRUCKMUTE (2002)

The Fora was still not truly defined as such. While it was already more than just a hangout for NGMB exiles, its existence as a separate, distinct entity still hadn't been carved out for good. If the NGMB had reversed their banning, for example, it's quite possible that the Fora could have ended right then and there. However, the hostilities continued as another tragic event occurred.

Struckmute.com was a Christian-based print magazine released quarterly. It had poetry, stories, opinion pieces, you name it. It also had quite lively message boards, and one of its boardies was that same Princeps Augustus. When the magazine went under, the Struckmuters were left without a home... so Princeps volunteered the Fora. A new forum was set up, "Kyriakos", that was meant to be a direct replacement of the Struckmute boards. The forum's color and image scheme was as identical to the Struckmute boards as it could have possibly been on an Ezboard, to boot.

Nevertheless, the magic seemed to have died with the magazine-Kyriakos didn't become the savior of the community that Princeps had hoped it would. Most of the Struckmuters went away after a while... although one of them, Undragoned1, sticks around to this day while others swing by once in a blue moon. After about a year, Princeps finally reorganized the forums to recognize the reality of Struckmute's death-and Kyriakos became the new religion forum, receiving Areopagus' theology topics and retaining the prayer requests from the post-Struckmute era.

The Struckmute era was important insofar as it gave the Fora a distinct identity. It was more than an NGMB exile board, more than a Struckmute refugee camp. The two combined into something new-the Classical Fora.


3) THE CLASSIC AGE OF THE FORA (2002-early 2003)

After the Struckmuters got settled in, a new dynamic emerged. The gothic element and the Christian rock element entered a sort of dialogue-not one borne out of disrespect or anger, but of mutual curiosity. Cthulhu jokes were explained alongside the role of Satan in Christian theology. There was plenty of debate but no division to be had. The board wasn't the liveliest ever, but it had a regular, reliable post count complete with intelligent discussion and friendly relations among all. Princeps, sistersandy and Archannus were the core around which the Classical Fora developed. They drove the board, and kept it lively.

Newcomers to the Fora in those days chanced upon it for one big, accidental reason-a single post made by Princeps describing his less-than-sterling experiences with Accelerated Christian Education, Inc. brought in others who did a search for a comic book character. This happened twice-bringing in a Navy wife stationed in Italy and a highschool girl from Montana screennamed Sola Peregrina.

The only incidents of note in the Classic Age were minor porn spamming efforts and a concerted wasting of board bandwidth by a self-proclaimed Messiah with visions of covering DC and London in thermonuclear blazes. Other than that, this was one of the best times to be a member of the Fora Augusta.


4) FALL AND PILLARIZATION (2003-2004)

The Fora slowly declined in importance as Princeps spent more and more time on the Pillar boards, though-the Fora's Classic Age didn't go out with a bang, but a whimper. A lack of new posting caused boardies to move on to other forums, and check back once in a long while-including Princeps himself.

Princeps' time on the Pillar boards led sistersandy to follow him there, and her signature and his profile linked many Pillarites back to the Fora. They didn't say much, but they helped keep things going on an otherwise quiet forum.

While the Fora was slowly decaying, the events at the Pillar boards would prove important to the future. Princeps was making friendships at those boards, as well as at the Godscare boards. He also became a prominent protestor against abuses at both places, gaining support and respect from the boardies at both places. He also helped Nostalgia (now Meliorative) set up Dreamsforsale.net, becoming one of the main posters at that site.

It would be all of these contacts that would enable what was to come next.


5) VOTING WITH THEIR FEET (early 2005)

There was already a history of Fora involvement in Pillar's protests. When a Moderators Only forum was crafted on the Pillar boards, Last Free Voices was created to counter it-and anyone who wasn't a Pillar mod could join. When Pillar decided to ban flaming on their message boards, though, that was the last straw for the bulk of the oldschoolers there. Princeps left the Pillar boards, and through IM encouraged others to do the same. His initial intended destination for the Pillarites was DFS, but one of the departees, kohlee03, decided to start things up at the Fora instead. Others followed suit, and within a week the Fora Augusta was alive again, eclipsing the Pillar boards.

At about the same time, Godscare erupted in riots against blatant discrimination. Princeps, Bloodlustgoddess, sistersandy and comingfrom decided to leave, and they came to the Fora. With them, they brought other Godscarers-Nyssa the Hobbit, Serenade7, Louder Mantra-and comingfrom generously decided to donate $30 to the Fora, enabling it to gain Gold Community status. This eased the transition of the Pillarites, and the Fora gained a significant new feature to boot-a chatroom, which became a common meeting place for the Forites, usually late at night.

Many Pillar traditions were grafted onto the Fora, such as the Pillarese-English Dictionary, but by and large it was a distinct community. Devoid of the riots they had on their old boards, fraternity blossomed. Once again, competing dynamics crafted something new. The remnants of the old Fora blended with the Pillar refugees, who blended with the Godscare refugees, who also blended with newcomers from Princeps' college.


6) THE EZFORUM FIASCO (June 2005)

Things were not to remain stable, however-a sudden crash of ezBoard's servers ruined years of historical posts, carefully archived and preserved. It also created a communication crisis for the Fora, who now had no home. From the road, Stu and Aaron managed to set up a new Fora on ezforum.org only a day after the ezBoard crash. A lot of Forites fell away, as it was in the middle of the summer, but the Fora still kept strong enough.

Alas, ezforum too had its share of problems. Downtime was frequent, and finally after three continuous days of ezforum's servers being down, the Fora had to move again. The Fora migrated to InvisionPlus, its current home, and Princeps spent two entire days designing the look of the Fora, which he personally considers to be the best out of all its incarnations.

The ezforum holdover did establish a couple things for the Fora, however. First off, one of our members actively turned against us and was banned, the Fora's first effective banning. Banning is something not done lightly; and it takes a successful supermajority poll to ban someone, so that the will of the community is respected.

Also, it established that the Fora is strong enough to survive a forum crisis; the posters will pick up and re-register.


7) LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND INVISIONPLUS (July 2005-2006)

After the move to InvisionPlus on the July 4 weekend of 2005, rebuilding was slow but it came. The Fora was down from its peak average of 200 posts a day to about 80 posts a day as posters continued to trickle in.

With the closing of DreamsForSale.com, the Fora's political section absorbed a few new posters, chiefly Username, Ethos and Acamas. Acamas quickly proved himself to be a troll and a supermajority wished him banned. He was therefore banned, but Princeps soon built a special section for banned posters, called Patmos, where those who didn't wish them to be banned could still interact with them. Acamas was resigned to that section, but soon managed to get the Fora shut down for a few days by posting child porn and ratting himself out to InvisionPlus' TOS Enforcement team. This led to his permanent emergency banning, ratified by a supermajority later.

The Fora's first banned poster, Adam, was similarly allowed to return at this time, but he only created more headaches for the forums by spamming and threatening "revolution" that only brought over people from the Otep boards. He finally threatened to do what Acamas had done, and was then emergency banned with similar post-facto ratification.

Ethos and Username, however, continue to grace us with their political views and with off-color political incorrectness. Other strong additions to the Fora in those times had been Dragonfly452, a Lakota webcartoonist, and PinkSpyder, a dormmate of Stu's.


8) PILLAR IS DONE (summer-fall 2006)

Adam decided to continue his all-out assault on Princeps after his banning, and quickly registered at every single board Princeps posted at and harassed him. The motive for this was unclear at first, and suspected to be simple trolling, but as time went on it became clearer that the leader of the Fora was basically being stalked by a bicurious troll from Florida. This led to Rule 8, arguably the most famous provision of the Fora's rules:

8) Don't be Adam Flanagan. I don't think I can stress this one enough. Adam Flanagan is a little whiny bitch whose entire life revolves around trying to irritate me because the entire Fora wanted me to ban his ass, and I did. He's a brutish little bi-curious troll, who can get away with this shit simply because he has no life outside of the internet. His little classmates hate him, no girl would date him, simply because he is an ugly person in every single respect. He will basically grow up to be a murder-suicide, I am convinced. So, basically, DO NOT BE ADAM FLANAGAN.

It became a sticking point in Adam's spamming, and he demanded its removal on many occasions. The admins laughed.

In other news, posters began to arrive from an otherkin messageboard, "Sleeping In Eternal Darkness." Princeps, who usually played the role of a person's unwelcome rude awakening, found himself trying to be nice and keep the peace on his own boards. The newcomers had annoying habits; huge signatures and avatars caused new restrictions to be drafted. A look over on SIED reveals the sort of crap that they're into. There were many problems in this uneasy relationship until Princeps and Vasilius Konstantinos, another admin, finally tired of the pretense and started a thread calling the "otherkin" out. ("We're not laughing at you, we're laughing at the half-demon wererat inside of you.")

Also, Princeps got married. To a callgirl, apparently. To put it most succinctly, his rational faculties were essentially pwnz0red by love and he is lucky that he didn't catch the HIV from his relationship with this... woman. He is now happily divorced, though, and his ex-wife doesn't post on the Fora any longer. Instead, she is evidently screwing vampire incubi and some werewolf Marines twit that she met on SIED. Yay standards!

Speaking of bad relationships that ended very humorously and dramatically, it was right before the time of the divorce that the Pillar boards again returned to the forefront of the Fora's collective mind. Adam began posting on there a while before, and began calling out Princeps, who returned there from his self-imposed exile and engaged in a mano-a-mano flamewar of epic proportions. By the end of it, Adam was banned from the Pillar boards (depriving him of the amusement of trolling fundamentalist Christian children) and the Fora had gained HollowEyes as a member. He is now an admin.

However, the good sense of the Pillar boards was not to remain, and the band eventually let Adam return. This caused the exodus of even more Pillarites to the Fora. Thereupon, he used the Pillar boards as a base from which to pornspam the Fora for a while, until the Pillar boards shut down without warning one day.


9) CHADRON STATE AWESOME (fall 2006-December2008)

Stu/Princeps went to college in this tiny town in Nebraska called Chadron. In the course of his collegiate years he brought several of his real-life friends onto the forum: pierdellevigne (who he had lost an election to in the Campus Historical Forum), Dragonfly452 (who had gotten into racism fights with Ethos), PinkSpyder, Rhob Cayer, etc. But the five most lasting members were still to come.

RunningDuck was a pre-law major and a part of the CSC Anime Club, along with CanNinjaGetSly. Hestya/Anne was Stu's fiancee for a year. Krad Elos and nads were both players in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with Stu and Stu's brother Logan (tamago on the Fora for all three times he's ever posted).

Duck was a major player. He got into serious climate debates with Username, and an epic 2008 primary debate saw Duck making sock puppets to explain basic principles of the Constitution to Acamas. A thread where Duck debunked Acamas' claims about Obama's birth certificate has gone down in Forite history as the definitive word on the subject, and even prompted the admins to censor all terms relevant to the debate as it never needs to be argued again. (If you really really want to, just th.row a pe.riod som.ewhere in the w.ord, we'll make fun of you but we won't care.)

Nate/nads was the other main poster to come out of Stu's time in Chadron. Stu got bored one day and added a word to the (then-small) wordfilter list, and offered keys to the first person to guess it. Seven pages later, nads guessed it and became the Fora's third active admin. (Sarge and SWOCOOM are just sleeping, and the other "admins" are puppet accounts.) Together with his real-life friend Krad Elos, they're all that's left of Chadron on the Fora now that Stu's graduated.


10) 4.0RA (summer 2008-summer 2009)

InvisionPlus' servers stopped working for about three months. About a week into the difficulties, Stu decided to set up yet another incarnation of the Fora, and everyone moved yet again. Not much to tell, except that probably the last chapter of the Adam saga finally played itself out, and an exodus of sorts began among most of the board's Orthodox Christians.

Stu and his friend Vasilius Konstantinos' wife Tatiana Kryanna had a falling out. This resulted in the estrangement of Stu and VK, which eventually resulted in everyone from the old NGMB but sistersandy leaving, as well as Nyssa the Hobbit and her husband Mind Cutter, who had become close real-life friends with VK and Kyra. Around the same time, amos, the board's loudest Pentecostal, decided he couldn't take the forum's "un-Christian" atmosphere any longer, and that long-running Republican troll Acamas also finally got bored of trolling us, and left too.

That meant that the forum became a bit of an echo chamber. There was still plenty of disagreement and debate, but with the exodus of most of the Christians the forum became largely composed of leftists of one stripe or another and secularists, with the number of believers of any kind countable on one's fingers. Everyone more or less understood that their disagreements were trivial compared to the disagreements they had had with those who had just left.

Finally, the coup de grace of 4.0ra came with the last chapter of the Adam saga. Adam hacked the place and installed "Hello Kitty" graphics all over by taking over Stu's account. Stu, using his now ex-fiancee's account, informed everyone to move back to the third Fora, which was once again working properly.

After this, the third Fora got reorganized. avaxpia (previously Meliorative and before that Nostalgia) bitched long enough about there being too many useless forums that finally Stu did something about it. Kyriakos was finally merged into Areopagus and deleted. A forum called "Arena" was created for the spam that proliferated. A forum called "Drunk Tank" was created when most of the new posts on the Fora involved drinking; this would later become the Clubhouse. The Fora's best posts were compiled in Mnemnodromos, a forum concept revived from the old Ezboard days.

The Clubhouse was created after Username and avapxia agitated for a subforum of their own. Princeps axed the Drunk Tank and the Arena, and erected the Clubhouse in its stead, making Username and avapxia co-moderators there. After a tussle between User and nads, I created a "Time Out" forum where they were both "grounded" until they could work out their differences. Shit was so cash.


11) EAT RAIDS AND DIE: THE SHOWBOARDS AND THE SWITCHBOARDS (summer 2009-present)

However, without the rightist opposition, the Fora was going nowhere. Princeps checked out the old Pillararchives site he had made years ago, and posted it on the Fora, and everyone laughed at how stupid they sounded to themselves back then. However, it was resolved to go looking for a Christian rock board to post on.

The first candidate was the boards of the Christian rock band Showbread. The Showboards weren't terribly lenient when it came to swearing, but other than that we seemed to fit in. We got along with most of the posters on those boards, as well as the mods. Debate was spirited but largely friendly. But a significant minority was enraged by our presence and our not being evangelical Christians, a significant minority that created their own board. This led to more drama which finally led to the band themselves deciding to shut the boards down a couple weeks after banning us. Only recently did they start a new board up, but it costs $5 to join and nobody's sure if that particular experiment will succeed.

So, you can kinda say that the Fora is responsible for Showgnarok, albeit unintentionally. We did get a few members out of the deal, and originalpersonalalt is a core Forite these days. virgil, when he shows up, is cool too.

After that, we went looking for a new Christian rock board to "raid." We found one, the Switchfoot boards (or Switchboards, because Stu likes bad puns). However, by and large they proved to be more tolerant. That didn't stop a controversy from arising, of course, but it more or less boiled over. Princeps even won "Biggest Ego" in their 2009 forum awards by acting like an even more conceited jackass than he really is, and we're still over there today.

So yeah, that's the Fora up to the present day. That's who we are, what we do, how we roll. We always like newcomers, no matter who you are or what kind of fucked-up shit you may or may not think. So come kill some time with us; we've been rocking this shit for over seven years and we're still having fun.