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Happy five years since the wipe!

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Note: This is not SMWC's actual birthday. That falls on Jan. 1 and the site will be seven years old.

August 20th, 2007 marked the site's "Great Wipe", in which the site was restored from a previous "Everyone is an Admin" day. To celebrate this occasion, I've spent the past couple of days compiling two things.

1. A timeline of (most) of the major events which have occurred on SMWC since the wipe.
2. ZIP files of most of the previous Vanilla/Chocolate/24 Hour contests. If you've ever wanted to play the old stuff, now you can.

Without further ado:

2007:

Aug. 20: Revival of the site after "Everyone is an Admin" day.
Aug. 23: S.N.N. gets his first staff promotion and becomes a local moderator.
Aug. 23: The hack removal log thread becomes public and is sticked in the hack discussion forum.
Sept. 27: The post menu design contest occurs.
Oct. 3: Site schemes now have the right and left menu options.
Oct. 13: The custom music section opens.
Oct. 17: Appears to mark the first usage of the infamous "EGGS" song.
Oct. 23: SMWC's first "Mosts" awards occur.
Dec. 4: 10 million views!

2008:

January: SMWC is down due to the uprising of Nightfall, which was meant to be SMWC's "successor". Given its not-yet-ready state, it was shut down at the beginning of February.
Feb. 14: SMWC's first official "Vanilla" Level Design Contest opens. 51 levels were submitted.
Feb. 22: Users can start donating money to the site.
Mar. 10: The site starts hosting google ads.
Apr. 29 - May 18: The only time we've ever had real staff applications.
May 18: The staff application results are announced resulting in S.N.N. being promoted to administrator. Other promotions can be seen in this thread.
May 18: SMWC's second official contest opens, the Automatic Level Design Challenge. 33 levels were submitted. Two other consents are run at the same time: the Touhou tournament and "name that tune".
May 28: 50% of the RAM map is complete.
June 11: ArBeWhat's first major attack on the site, wiping the database of hacks.
July 12: The idea for An SMW Central Production is first coined by Buu here.
July 13: Dots and Binary ranksets are added.
July 16: The Chrono Trigger rankset is added.
July 19: SMWC's second "Mosts" awards occur.
July 20: the SMRPG rankset is added.
July 24: IPS patches become disallowed in favor of xkas patches.
Aug. 10: The official IRC channel moves to irc.centralchat.net.
Aug. 31: The first SMWC Idol (music porting contest) opens.
Sept. 9: The first official announcement of C3, the SMW Central Creativity Convention.
Sept. 9: Andy_k_250 gets promoted to local moderator and Kyoseron (Counterfeit) gets promoted to full moderator.
Sept. 9: The birthday thread is born.
Sept. 23: "Anonymous" event. Everyone's identity was hidden and people went nuts.
Oct. 8: The Haunted Level Design Challenge opens. 33 levels were submitted.
Oct. 18: The first official IRC "workshop" (a real-time tutorial) occurs, hosted by FirePhoenix in regards to learning Super Metroid hacking. This would act as a gateway for future workshops.
Oct. 31: SMWC's File Bin opens.
Nov. 1/2: SMWC's first C3 event occurs.
Nov. 14: The "Technical Fixes, and Helpful Tips." section is added into the F.A.Q
Nov. 28: ArBeWhat's second major attack on the site, banning several staff members in the process.
Dec. 6: SMWC's third "Mosts" awards occur.

2009:

Jan. 17: The first introduction of The Magician occurs, in which he word-filtered hacking terms into magic words.
Jan. 27: The Super Mario RPG Hacking forum opens soon after the release of Lazy Shell. Unfortunately, this editor never really took off anywhere.
Jan. 28: The hack submission guidelines are updated after a long time.
Feb. 4: The first Overworld Design Contest opens. 18 overworlds were submitted.
Feb. 11: SMWC's second official "Vanilla" Level Design Contest opens. 62 levels were submitted.
Feb. 26: Work on An SMW Central Production begins.
Feb. 28: The second official IRC "workshop" occurs, this time involving ASM tutoring.
Mar. 5/6: ArBeWhat's third and final major attack on SMWC.
Mar. 10: Broozer and Foursword4 are promoted to local moderators in order to replace Kyoseron.
Apr. 2: The ExGFX section reaches 1000 files.
Apr. 10: The Pokémon rankset is added.
Apr. 19: Cave story rankset is added.
Apr. 21: The first staff reorganization occurs, info can be found here.
May 9/10: SMWC's second C3 event occurs.
June 16: The Display Case is created to store all the funny and awesome threads.
July 1st: Steven (Jacob) and Blumiere become the first member and staff member of the month. This gives birth to the member of the month tradition and lasts until march 2010.
June 16/17: S.N.N.'s 5000th post (the "Doomsday" event), leading to a new site scheme.
June 24: The Tetris Attack/Panel de Pon Tournament opens. It was actually successful too!
June 24: Caffie Radio opens for the first time.
July 10: SMWC's fourth "Mosts" awards occur.
July 23: Hot off the Press and Reality Corner forums open.
July 30: SMWC -finally- gets its own dedicated IRC server which is still used to this date - irc.caffie.net.
Aug. 2: Chester is promoted to take System's place.
Aug. 8: The Requests section opens. Oh boy, does it ever open.
Aug. 10: Supertails is promoted to administrator.
Aug. 18: The Anime and Manga forum opens.
Aug. 20: Jimmy52905 gets promoted to local and music moderator.
Aug. 20: The Yoshi's island rankset is added.
Aug. 24: SMWC's first official "Chocolate" Level Design Contest opens. 35 levels were submitted.
Sept. 5: 50 million views!
Sept. 23: The Moderation of Hacks and Files forum opens.
Sept. 24: After years of silence, FuSoYa releases Lunar Magic v1.64 on its 9th birthday.
Oct. 1: And then Lunar Magic v1.65 was released.
Oct. 10: The Lunar Magic Creativity Contest (design an image using tiles in LM) occurred. 41 entries were submitted.
Nov. 1: The destruction of the Valley Fortress forum occurs.
Nov. 2: The Midnight Crew event, consisting of S.N.N., Supertails, Kieran Menor, and FirePhoenix, occurred. Although the themed layouts and avatars are gone, remnants of the event are here.
Nov. 14/15: SMWC's third C3 event occurs.
Nov. 17-Dec. 23: Supertails hosts the trophy design contest. The winning trophies are still being used for the mosts and C3 awards.
Nov. 22: SMWiki reopens.
Nov. 26: SMWC's fifth "Mosts" awards occur.
Nov. 27: Lucas is promoted to local moderator of the gaming and game creation forums.
Dec. 6: The winter site scheme is added.
Dec. 17-22: Applications for new hack moderators open. 10 are chosen. Results can be seen here.
Dec. 27: Iceguy joins the staff team to replace Katelynn (Caitlin).

2010:

Jan. 28: a SMW's netplay time trialing tournament is held.
Feb. 7: SMWC's third official "Vanilla" Level Design Contest opens. 124 levels were submitted.
Mar. 18: The official "revival" of An SMW Central Production occurs.
Mar. 21: The "In Shape" site scheme is added in order to celebrate spring.
Apr. 1: A convenient coincidence that our 10000th registered user occurred on this date, which opened up a "dimensional portal" to an alternate timeline of SMWC.
Apr. 1: Lunar Magic v1.70 is released. For real. It wasn't a joke. It's also the version which included four times as much Map16 space. Arguably, this was the best update the program has ever received.
Apr. 6: Kristian and Dotsarecool start a SMW Central news series which doesn't last long
Apr. 18: Lunar Magic v1.71 was released.
Apr. 25-May 7: A C3 poster contest is held. Counterfeit wins.
May 2: Atma joins the staff as a local and music moderator.
May 4: The "A Forum" event occurs, in which every post reduced user's postcount by 10.
May 8/9: SMWC's fourth C3 event occurs.
May 11: The second SMWC Idol (music porting contest) begins.
May 19: SMWC starts hosting project wonderful ads.
June 4: The Contests and Events forum opens.
July 22: Aqualakitu and Smalhacker "took over" Kieran's account. Fun and chaos were had by many.
July 24: Forum renovation occurs, rendering the forums useless for the next month. This also marked the creation of subforums.
Aug. 14: Google Ads are removed from the site, leading to a brief monetary problem. Thankfully, we overcame this.
Aug. 16: The International forums open, allowing for users of different nationalities and languages to discuss hacking.
Aug. 16: Removal logs have a subforum for each type of resource and are written in separate threads for each submission.
Sept. 8: SMWC's second official "Chocolate" Level Design Contest opens. 40 entries were submitted.
Sept. 15: The awesome kitteh thread event occurs, which was .. something.
Sept. 22: Camerin Neede (Camerin/Kadyastar) joins the staff as a local and music moderator.
Sept. 23: 100 million views!
Sept. 24: Lunar Magic's 10th birthday, and the release of v1.8.
Oct. 9: Lynnes Joins the staff as a hack moderator but is demoted due to inactivity shortly after.
Oct. 16-Nov. 1: The halloween site scheme is enforced untill Halloween, then it becomes a selectable scheme from the list.
Oct. 28: The Kaizo Hacks forum opens.
Oct. 28: Ultimaximus is promoted to local moderator.
Oct. 31: Kadyastar (Camerin) and Atma raise the bar for music submissions.
Nov. 1: Lunar Magic v1.81 is released.
Nov. 8: The moderation of hacks and files opens and replaces the sticked "ask a hack moderator" thread.
Nov. 9: Forum Games reopen.
Nov. 10: SMW Central starts advertising in Jul, this caries on to the end of the year.
Nov. 12: netcvb is made into an "admin". Or so he thinks.
Nov. 13/14: SMWC's fifth C3 event occurs.
Nov. 26: SMWC's sixth "Mosts" awards occur.
Dec 1.: Kadyastar starts running the banopardy event.
Dec. 4-21: S.N.N. runs the SMWCP banner contest. Counterfeit wins...again.
Dec. 7: The first (and ony thus far) official contest with real prizes opens, the Winter Level Design Contest. The top prize was a SNES with Super Mario World. 51 levels were submitted.
Dec. 23: The music IRC channel revives as #imamusic.
Dec. 23: Paper Mario, Megaman and Earthbound ranksets are added.
Dec. 30: The Yoshi's Island scheme by Counterfeit is added.
Dec. 30: The Introductions forum opens.
Dec. 31: An SMW Central Production, SMWC's first major collaborative hack involving over 200 users, is released. Although many thought the hack was flawed in certain aspects, it is still regarded as something special simply due to its collaborative nature.

2011:

Jan. 14: A full walkthrough is written and released on SMWiki for SMWCP.
Jan. 14: The planning forum for An SMW Central Production 2 opens.
Jan. 26: Zeldara109 is promoted and becomes the local moderator of the Yoshi's Island subforum.
Jan. 30: The postcount of every single user was set to ?/?. Fun fun fun.
Feb. 6: The fourth official "Vanilla" Level Design Contest occurs. 86 levels were submitted.
Feb. 7: The rules are updated again, this time all the guidelines are compiled in one thread.
Feb. 15: The giygas site scheme by Leod is added.
Feb. 15: The SWMC daily lottery officilly starts but is cancelled shortly after.
Feb. 18: Techokami gives the F.A.Q. an overdue update.
Feb. 19: A staff remvamp is made. All moderators gain power over all the forums. Ersanio is promoted to administrator, Hadron joins the staff team and Roy and Lighvayne return.
Feb. 20: SMWC is protected by ReCaptcha, which didn't do much to stop spambots, actually.
Feb. 23: Rambowjo creates a "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" thread, resulting in many users of the site becoming bronies.
Feb. 25: The first beta release of Addmusic 4.05 occurs. What made this so special is that, unlike the old Addmusics released by Romi/Carol, this one was (and still is) compatible on real hardware.
Feb. 25: A news article appears stating all hacks must be compatible with bsnes in order to be accepted. This causes a commotion and a lot of complains from both staff members and regular users who aren't happy with this sudden new rule.
Feb. 28: 123,456,789th view!
Mar. 9: The french SMW hacking forum opens.
Mar. 24: A tech video showing some of the SMWCP2 graphics and music is released.
Mar. 27: aj6666 and Lexator get promoted to moderate the Spanish and French forums respectively. The former still operates as a staff member, while the later never really did anything and was demoted in December.
Apr. 2: Level signups for SMWCP2 begin. This marks one of the most traffic-intensive periods the site has ever seen. All ~80 of the signup threads were claimed in under a minute.
Apr. 15: Nyan Cat invades the site, covering the pages with its rainbowy goodness.
Apr. 27: Snes9x v1.53 is released.
Apr. 29: The nyan cat rankset is updated, now everyone can have a differently colored nyan cat.
May 1: The ROM/RAM map remoderation begins.
May 3: The caffie radio is revived.
May 7/8: SMWC's sixth C3 event occurs.
May 9: The Geiger Karma rankset which was enforced during C3 is added to the profile options.
May 25: The bowser's inside story rankset is added.
May 26: After a staff discussion, it was decided that C3 and the mosts would be held annually instead of biannually.
May 28: A subforum for each world of SMWCP2 is created.
May 31: SMWC Idol 3 occurs. This was arguably the most successful of the four.
June 8: New badges are created and become obtainable thanks to wiiqwertyuiop and a few other users.
June 14: The Featured Hacks category is removed, and all of the ratings were wiped.
July 2: Princess Celestina invades S.N.N.'s account and uses his 15000th post to complain about the people of SMW Central hating on ponies.
July 3: The name change list is made public.
July 7: the Music and writing subforums are merged into art.
July 27: Kipernal joins the staff team as a tool moderator.
July 28: The music remoderation starts.
Aug. 2: An announcement is made to look for a radio dirrector. FUGGNUTS was chosen.
Aug. 17: Due to how large of a sub-category porting became, the Custom Music subforum was opened. This allowed people to both show off their work AND get help on specific music issues.
Aug. 17: Slash Man joins the staff team as a music moderator.
Aug. 27: The first 24 Hour SMW Challenge occurs ("Design a 9th door in Bowser's Castle would look like in 24 hours").
Sept. 25: Lunar Magic v1.90 is released.
Sept. 25: Featured Hack of the Week news posts begin.
Oct. 3: Crispy Yoshi joins the staff team as a music moderator.
Oct. 8: Cyphermur9t joins the staff team as a hack moderator.
Oct. 24: An announcement thread is created in order to inform users about stealing. This causes complaints from users who disagree which results in the birth of the "ethics of ROM hacking" thread.
Oct. 31: After years of work, the RAM map becomes 100% documented!
Nov. 1: The MOTM tradition is revived by Camerin and aj6666 and is still running currelty.
Nov. 14: p4plus2 joins the staff team to moderate the ROM and RAM map.
Nov. 20: The block remoderation starts.
Nov. 21: SMWC's seventh "Mosts" awards occur.
Dec. 11: The "Secret Santa" level design event opens, in which users send in an idea for a level and someone has to design it for them (without knowing who the original user is, of course).
Dec. 27: Lunar Magic v1.91 is released.

2012:

Jan. 1: The music remoderation is finished.
Jan. 18: SMWC joins the Internet-wide blackout rally against the SOPA bill, which aimed to stop all kinds of Internet piracy.
Feb. 1: The fifth official "Vanilla" Level Design Contest occurred. 98 levels were submitted.
Feb. 20: NEW! SMW2: Yoshi's Island is released after several years of being a work in progress. It is rare to see full Yoshi's Island hacks completed, so this was a somewhat large deal.
Feb. 26: Another official workshop is held on the IRC channel #serioushax, involving ASM tutoring.
Apr. 28: The System vs. Chester "war" officially began and carried on until C3.
May 4-7: SMWC's seventh C3 event occurs. The releases in this one are regarded as some of the best out of any of the C3 events.
May 6: SMWCP2's official teaser trailer was released, and featured on GoNintendo.com.
May 6: Lunar Magic v2.00 was released, which was the first version to feature LMSW, a built-in emulator!
May 12: Masashi27 joins the staff team as a music moderator.
May 15: SMWC Idol 4 occurs.
May 21: Lunar Magic v2.01 was released.
May 26: The second 24 Hour Design Challenge occurred ("Create a new title screen using the ORIGINAL movements in 24 hours").
June 5: The Magician declares System as the winner of the war. System get her old position back and Chester is demoted to moderator of the trash can.
June 14: The glassified site scheme is added.
June 27: The second official Overworld Design Contest occurred. 25 entries were submitted.
July 17: Pikerchu13 is promoted to handle SMWC's YouTube channel.
Aug. 1: To cater to differing tastes, all hack removal logs were made public - that is, users could post in them.
Aug. 2: The Roleplayers' Guild forum opens.
Aug. 2: The Derpy Backslide Institute For The Mentally 'Special' opens and subsequently closes.
Aug. 17: 200 million views!
Aug. 20: Present date.




And here are a few of the contest links:

Vanilla Level Design Contest 2008

Autoplay Level Design Contest 2008

Haunted Level Design Contest 2008

Chocolate Level Design Contest 2009

Lunar Magic Creativity Contest 2009

Overworld Design Contest 2009

Vanilla Level Design Contest 2010

Chocolate Level Design Contest 2010

Winter Level Design Contest 2010

24 Hour Design Challenge 2011

24 Hour Design Challenge 2012

Overworld Design Contest 2012


..and that's all I have for contests. I haven't compiled the other Vanilla contests, so whoever wants to post them is more than welcome to.

That's all. Enjoy!
Congrats, SMWC! It's really great to see how long this site has lasted, and how great the community has lasted! Heres to another five years!

- BlackMageMario
You forgot to mention my personal TV show :P prrrr *shot*

Now i'm expecting someone saying "let's celebrate more important things".

Do i give an Happy Birthday? Or do we need a crystal sphere for the future events? But no offense, SMWC was more interesting previously, but, at least, i saw things improved here.
My deviantART
My Youtube channel
My avatar
Watch, i made a Super Mario 64 level
Clearly this means drinks, ponies, streamers, drinks, LP forums, drinks, patting ourselves on the back, staff-making ceremonies, drinks, and drinks!

(In all seriousness congratulations to SMWC for making it so far, and having a great community for five years.)
GvS @smwcentral.net ~ u:11380
Awh yeah, that's neat. It's really nice to read the history of SMWC, the site sure has gone through quite a lot. Five years is long, and I hope we'll easily add a lot more years to that. Congrats, SMWC.
Originally posted by BlackMageMario
Congrats, SMWC! It's really great to see how long this site has lasted, and how great the community has lasted! Heres to another five years!

This really.

And definitely nice to see the events and such that took place that I missed/don't remember.
Why is it every time I hear 'great wipe' I always imagine one of the admins cleaning up after laying a brick?

In all seriousness though. Awesome. Nice to see we're good enough to not have another one.
SMWC's official dentist since 2011.

YouTube - Threads - Bluesky
Wow... So it's been 5 years... Well, that's... great, at least we won't cause this again, will we?
YOUR layout has been removed.

I do non-kaizo beta tests!
Check my profile for more details.

A Mario and Luigi Story: The Universe's Star Demo 2:
50%
Status: Dead until I regain interest. Link to hack thread.

Five years after the wipe? It's been a long time. Congrats to everyone for not letting we have another wipe like that one, and I wish we have a lot of years still coming. :)
It's easily the best thing I've done
So why the empty numb?
7 years of SMWCentral
5 years of Great Wipe

Wait what why did I never find this

Derpy you have some 'splaining to do.

Otherwise, a happy five-year pseudo-anniversary to all, and here's to many more years to come.
Layout by Mirann <3

I'm probably retired tbh
Five years after the wipe? Wow. Congrats, SMWC!
Windowless ride, feeling alive
Are you alive or just breathing?
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Latest: Year 2020
Tip:
Glad to see you alive long and quite well, SMW Central. You survived while other places have died and reincarnated many times and split.

If there's anything this can tell you, this community is strong and that's how it lives. Well done, SMW Central, may you continue for another five or seven.

I'm impressed with how many updates Lunar Magic received. I remember the last time I hacked SMW was with LM 1.43 or whatever the oldest known version was.

...200 million views is no joke. Major promotion credibility right there.

Well done leaders of SMWC. Keep forward.
Originally posted by ZMann

Wait what why did I never find this

Derpy you have some 'splaining to do.
.

SNN made me a forum and it was awesome. All the 'splainin you need to know.
Looking forward into the future, you have to just wonder what this site has in store for us in future years to come.

I did like it when everyone's postcount was changed to ?, the reactions of users made the site really fun and exiting at he time.
User: Hinalyte / ID: 1553 ~ loading kotori.css
Quote
Jan. 30: The postcount of every single user was set to ?/?. Fun fun fun.


I thought this thing happened in 2011.

----

Oh anyway, nice achievements. Looking forward to the future.
Congratulations!!
Okay, I've sure missed a lot while lurking since 2009 and playing hacks in the Featured Hacks section before it was removed (I still wonder why it was dismantled along with ratings). Seeing some of the entries submitted in previous vanilla level contests, I'm actually still waiting for the next one. I should be even smarter then.

By the way, do you have any history before the Great Wipe of August 2007?
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Originally posted by levelengine
Featured Hacks section before it was removed (I still wonder why it was dismantled along with ratings)

Featured was removed because it was way too easy to get hacks nominated and there was other issues with it as well. Ratings were removed because it was too easy to rate something low for no reason and it was wanted to attach ratings to reviews to prevent this and such. Although both systems have still not had much done to them for awhile so who knows.


It is amazing to see what all changed. There's many new users and posts being made and all sorts of things being done to further SMW Hacking. If you told some of what happened back to the users in 2006, you might have gotten laughed at probably. It is almost scary as technology advances, and in a way that too happened here.

I remember first joining this place, before the NightFall 'successor'. Wow, I really sucked at hacks and stuff. Now... I haven't really hacked, I just stay for the community mostly.

Congrats SMWC admins and Users!
Oh, it is so on.
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