The Wynncraft Forums Iceberg

Alright, let's start by getting the basics out of the way. For those who have never seen one, an iceberg chart is a chart about information on a topic, with information towards the bottom of the image being more obscure. You've probably seen some on common topics like Super Mario 64 or Google Maps. There have even been a few about Wynncraft. But I decided to make one on the best part of the server: the forums. Also iceberg charts are cool as hell IMO and I always wanted to do one, and I'm ashamed to say this is a topic I know too much about (but not the most about, there's probably stuff on the site even I didn't know)

This iceberg is split into 6 sections, with lower sections being more obscure (or just major topics that no one ever really talks about). Enjoy:



I'm curious to see how many of these you know; I'll probably explain all of them in a week or so if there are some people still haven't gotten. None of these entries are jokes necessarily, although I really wanted to add "search bar" at the way bottom. That being said I couldn't include TOO much obscure stuff, especially regarding specific members, since those people actually know me, probably. Also I obviously couldn't include NSFW topics for obvious reasons.

Spoiler: Text for those who can't read it on the image

Well-Known:
Secret VIP Section
Shoutbox
Your News Feed
Forum Emojis
Profile Info Page
Forum Leaderboards
Counting Threads
Forum Themes
Necroposting
Bumping

Slightly Less Known:
Advanced Search Features
Max # of Trophy Points
Salted and Colin gave themselves Trophy Points
9/7*
Daily Profile Posts
Gelbin and Craftedmovie
Editing Quotes
True Signature Size
Robots
10 Character Minimum
Wynncraft Account
BBCode
Mod Promotion Threads

Unknown:
King of Ragni*
Minecraft News*
Homestuck Ikimaru Cult*
Reduce Lag Thread*
Void Rift*
Community Rants*
Xenforo
Spambots
Following Limit

Very Unknown:
Number in Profile Page URL refers to how many people joined before you
Total # of members is incorrect
Admintest1*
Shifting community standards for Profile Posts
Max Character Limit
“List of Wynncraft Orchestral Remakes”

Super Obscure:
Sorting Threads by Likes
Wayback Machine
Pre-Xenforo Forums
Conversations with dozens of members
Only one Admin’s profile wasn’t deleted in 9/7
Community Assimilation

Abyss:
“Mexico Banned From Selling Nintendo Products”
Almost no members have used the forums
Any post could be part of an ARG
The forums are dying

Spoiler: additional notes

I can understand that this can go in Your Work or the meme thread but:
- It doesn't really feel like "my work" since it's a glorified list.
- I want to encourage some discussion in the comments, and those don't really belong on the meme thread which I believe should only be memes and nothing else.

also the wynncraft section needs more life

image source: Iceberg (Cyber Security) | LinkedIn

EDIT: I accidentally put in "editing quotes" and "wynncraft account" twice lol, also "10 posts needed to post links" should've probably been in the top tier

 

That moment when you take a glance at the bottom tier and recognize the ARG one

 

Wasn’t the whole, “Mexico Banned From Selling NintendoProducts” thing because they leaked Super Mario Odyssey before their agreed upon date?

Don’t know what the ARG is. And the last one is kinda obvious; the forums just aren’t what they used to be. It’s not really a bad thing though; we didn’t have a Discord back then and everyone moves on eventually.

 

Very cool!

 

cool now explain them
thank you

 

The man doesn't have a thing for my house, also known as general suggestions.

 

Recognize almost all of them- missing one or two only! Only read if you're looking for answers.

Spoiler

Well-Known:
Secret VIP Section

It's mostly just for shitposts, similarly to the Discord server equivalent. vip_sans and all that. But did you know there's also a secret Content Team section?

Shoutbox
Rip to the shoutbox, the glorious haven of shitposting galore- just a single box, where you could post short messages (also showed new threads as they were made, which honestly is something I'm still missing from the forums to this day). The true heart of the forums, but was equally inactive as shitposty. It got deleted on February 10th 2019 with no warning whatshowever (may have been the 9th- don't remember it exactly), and aside from a single message from colin almost well over two years after the fact, the admins have not even acknowledged it ever existed or got deleted. Rumor is that mods aren't allowed to interact with the shoutbox suggestion thread after an incident in it relating to deleted votes on the suggestion, which is why it's managed to survive for nearly 3 years despite only having shoutbox style shitpost bumps. It's actually one of the most viewed and supported suggestions by now, and has more than twice the replies of the next largest suggestion thread. Remember to bump the shoutbox thread today!

Your News Feed
Never actually used it myself, but there's a somewhat hidden option to see the actions of all the people you've followed on the forums. Not actually useful at all.

Forum Emojis
Never let these come back into common use. Please.

Profile Info Page
Shoot, just remembered I'm somehow still using the exact description I wrote nearly 6 years ago when I first joined the forums. Well, uh, for your extra fun fact, the "Previous Usernames" tab used to actually work (I think it broke even a little while before the shoutbox was removed), and showed any previous usernames alongside dates of change. Believe it was bugged and then later intentionally kept hidden (thank god, my old username was pretty embarrassing)

Forum Leaderboards
I really hope I can make it on here one day! Anyway, good place to check forums legends. Did you know that (I believe) both @captainganon and @Yuno F Gasai were ahead of Salted in like count?

Counting Threads
The Forum Games section is like the backrooms of the Wynn forums. It's essentially a microcommunity of like 7 people, and they count. All day long. Every day. It's hard work, but probably worth it. Also houses the legendary Void Rift roleplay thread, which is somehow still alive and has the most messages and views of any thread.

Forum Themes
Oh! Oh! I made a really good comparison image for this a while back!


Necroposting
Please Do Not Necropost. Actually technically can't even really happen anymore since threads left inactive for 2 months are automatically closed. More often falsely called out than is actually true- remember that as long as it adds something new to a thread, even if it's sent like 3 weeks later, it's perfectly fine and not necroposting!

Bumping
Classic forum tradition of "bumping" threads back to the forefront of the list (only allowed in General Suggestions and Trade Market, though I've never heard of it being enforced anywhere) through short messages, traditionally "bump10char" to perfectly fill the minimum message length of 10 characters. My favorite secrety way is to make an empty spoiler, which creates an empty message but the code for the spoiler counts towards the character limit.

Slightly Less Known:
Advanced Search Features
Silly Fish. No one ever uses the search, how would they know about the advanced search!
It's true though. On the main page, the small search box actually can open up to a more advanced search with more options. You guys should use it sometime.

Max # of Trophy Points
Yeah. The max should be 229 (though the requirements for this is so crazy that this number has only been achieved twice in the long years the forums has existed). A large shoutout to the 217 club (every forums achievement other than the 10k posts one)- kind of seen as the true forum legends, there's probably like 40 or so people who achieved it. True number is unknown as every new 217 person pushes an old one of the points leaderboard, but oh well.

Salted and Colin gave themselves Trophy Points
Very rude, they gave eachother forum points several years back which made Salted take number 1 on the points leaderboard. Memory tells me Colin wasn't even on the board until recently, but he's taken number 1. Boo! Get em out of here! Grind posts if you want the points so badly!

9/7*
That fateful day that Jumla spilled some coffee. Oh dear. The forums' content essentially reset (though not entirely- I swear a few things from before did remain, profile posts I think?) which, almost directly coinciding with the Gavel update a few months later called in a completely new era of Wynncraft.

Daily Profile Posts
Counting days is also really quite in these days. A few prominent people would be @Altakar (he started numbering days 1200 something days ago- though he's a little cheaty and often skips a day) and myself! Didn't think I'd take this to brag a bit, huh? Personally on day 984 of daily profile posts, no days skipped.

Gelbin and Craftedmovie
Another known daily profile poster, coming from the very very early days of CraftedMovie. Keep posting man, maybe we'll get it back someday.

Editing Quotes
Wow, haven't been reminded of this in a while, but yes, you can actually make anyone say anything, and even change their name- just play around a little with the forums BB code.

True Signature Size
Ok I think there may be something a little more hidden but if I'm remembering correctly, signatures used to be able to be made gigantic and could take up a large portion of a post. Was later made to be hard limited to the current size, but some people still have huge signatures you can read on their profile page; for example @Madkurre has an excellent collection of boomer class builder memes.

Robots
Where else am I going to get my weird creams from? Much less prominent these days, but if you pay attention and get lucky, you may see a bot trying to advertise in a thread. @from filled up his entire following list with bots, if you're not convinced they exist.

10 Character Minimum
Starting to repeat myself a little, but there's a 10 character minimum on messages. Pretty sure that's standard for all forums.

Wynncraft Account
If you've applied to the Content Team or made a bug report before, you'll have had this guy slide into your DMs at some point. This account is a bot that handles forums related automation, but there's is someone who rarely checks it and talks. Unless it's actually gone sentient..?

BBCode
Forum code stuff. With a little bit of knowledge about it you can do some pretty funny things, but I believe you've included the best ones out of those in this iceberg already, so I won't name them quite yet.

Mod Promotion Threads
Mods usually get a thread announcing it when they start their trial. Always has an awful pun in the title- if you ever want to look them up, just search https://forums.wynncraft.com/forums/wynncraft.70/?prefix_id=13. Note: there's actually a lot of interesting stuff to say about prefixes that you could honestly make an entire thread about (WithTheFish's Secret Files perhaps?).

Unknown:
King of Ragni*
Genuinely don't know anything about this other than that the account exists- may have been a temporary test account, may have been an account for an admin that never really used it. Not sure, but take a look and maybe grace this wall with another post.

Minecraft News*
See, this is actually the dead part of the forums. IF you've ever looked through the forums, there's a small section inside a section that had a bot that reposted news from the official Minecraft blog. The bot as well as the section are long since dead and locked, but as the forums doesn't seem to be anywhere near as eager to just throw out old stuff as the actual server is, it will remain forever the most dead part of the forums.


Homestuck Ikimaru Cult*
I remember this faintly, but traumatizing enough to know it was real. Back in 2016, essentially half the wellknown forums users were all in a Homestuck cult. Apparently still persists to this day in a Discord server somewhere. Might ask about it- I actually read Homestuck for the first time fairly recently. Special fun fact would be a shoutouts to @Nepeta Leijon who is somehow TO THIS DAY staying in character and using the Nepeta reaction gifs.

Reduce Lag Thread*
Legendary. Please Reduce Lag. Can't believe we never thought of that. Salted's answer is supposedly the most liked single post ever, though that's probably been surpassed by some changelog by now. https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/reduce-lag.104298/

Void Rift*
Really taking the fun facts right out of my mouth, aren't you? To recap, the longest thread by a longshot, with the most amount of messages and views of any thread. Quite legendary, similarly also supposedly still going on in a Discord server somewhere.

Community Rants*
I'm not quite sure which sorts you're talking about, and I won't link them for kinda obvious reasons (they're pretty much always tied to large amounts of toxicity and bad memories for the people involved) but every so often, anywhere between half a year and a little over a year, there's some large scale thread that really gains a lot of traction (several from specifically guild community, others more generally criticizing the game as a whole) that usually devolves to flamewars, mods that handle the situation badly, admins that swoop in and never really give quite the right answer, it happens and will keep happening. Hey, wanna collab on one one day?

Xenforo
The specific forums engine the Wynn forums runs. I mean, it's right there in the left bottom of every single page in the forums! You can't miss it!

Spambots
Pretty much the same as the previously mentioned bots, just a little more active and a lot more annoying.

Following Limit
There's a following limit of 1000 people for a single person. Not sure if this was intentional or just a standard, but there have been people in the past who made it a sport to fill the 1000 following count. Followers doesn't seem to be limited- Salted's rocking well over 1200.

Very Unknown:
Number in Profile Page URL refers to how many people joined before you
I- Well- You know- Yeah, pretty much what you said here. Not too interesting. Should've made it about Colin's profile URL in my opinion.

Total # of members is incorrect
Yup, a lot of dead accounts that don't actually exist but still for some reason count towards the total number, because it seems to just look at the latest assigned number to a new person joining.

Admintest1*
I'm only vaguely recognizing this, but wasn't this the account that was supposedly behind 9/7? Got admin rank, gave themselves a huge amount of trophy points and spammed the shoutbox, or something.

Shifting community standards for Profile Posts
"This should be a profile post." An understandable message when posted on someone making a thread celebrating something really small, like finding their first legendary or beating the Temple of Legends for the first time. Not so small when it ended up almost overtaking the forums in early 2019, with the peak I remember was that being the first reaction to karen_kujou becoming the first to get level 100 in any single profession.

Max Character Limit
If I remember correctly, the maximum character limit on the opening post of a thread is 80k, and any new messages to it is 20k. I've hit the post count at least once myself, and I wonder if I'll ever get to hitting that 80k limit on a thread one day.

“List of Wynncraft Orchestral Remakes”
I don't really know why that specific thread is on here, it's a fairly recent one and I feel like most people that'd pay enough attention at an iceberg like this would have seen it..
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/list-of-wynncraft-orchestral-remakes.295433/

Super Obscure:
Sorting Threads by Likes
No clue how that's obscure- you just click the box and voila! You're searching by likes, or messages, or title. It's standardly in searching on last message. Sorting by title is my personal favorite: some really, really weird shit shows up- I'm remembering some "empty" or "void" thread that had no title and you couldn't click on the thread, but I can't find it at the moment.

Wayback Machine
Unless there's some huge secret hidden in the some old page, it's just interesting to take a look at the snapshots that exist of the forums, especially from pre-9/7.
https://web.archive.org/web/2021*/forums.wynncraft.com
Neat fun fact here is that these ancient icons for sections still exist under the current shinier ones- if you make every thread in the section read, they appear for whatever reason.

Pre-Xenforo Forums
nope. i'm not that old. sorry.

Conversations with dozens of members
Conversations with someone you wanted to buy a random level 60 legendary from. Conversations for some mystery game in the Forum Games. Conversations that were made only because conversations where mentioned recently somewhere. A random conversation someone added you to but neither person ever said anything. Conversations.

Only one Admin’s profile wasn’t deleted in 9/7
I'm going to assume that was Hama, considering they were the first numbered profile that still exists, and they used to be a web Admin way back when.

Community Assimilation
One of us One of us One of us One of us One of us One of us

Abyss:
“Mexico Banned From Selling Nintendo Products”
Nope. Actually don't recognize this one.

Almost no members have used the forums
Wynn has had millions and millions of unique players. And yet only a few tens of thousands of people have actually used the forums. Clearly, Salted is just making up numbers to get into the Guiness book of records.

Any post could be part of an ARG
Will you answer the Phone?

The forums are dying
Yeah, pretty much, even as far back as I remember they were always more active the year before. Maybe eventually people will move back to the forums after the Discord has perfectly and truly gone to hell, but as it stands, the forums have been decaying in active users and new threads over the years. Especially recently, being faced with the largest content drought we've had in years. Still, hold hope, the shoutbox may return yet- and with it shall come all those who have left the forums empty, and these walls will be filled once more.

 

damn you like, responded to everything

 

Oh wow this is super detailed, thank you for the write up (and plugging this in Wynn main too)!

might as well comment on what you said

Spoiler

- iirc it was jumla’s profile that survived 9/7
- the orchestral remix thread had this really weird bbcode spreadsheet I’ve never seen before, and it seems like others had never seen it either.
- I thought searching by likes was actually more obscure, it took me like 5 years to find (maybe it’s just new?)
- there’s nothing hidden on the Wayback machine besides my old cringey posts
- the arg post was actually the only (semi) joke, as I never really saw the phone event as one. The reason it’s on here is because there’s a possibility that any post could be a part of some hardcore internet arg, but it was just overlooked.

 

Definitely not new, I remember it existed back in 2016 already- and it definitely did by 2018.

Glad you liked the writeup, I'm an enjoyer of obscure forums facts myself as well :p

I couldn't find the missing name weird thread, but here's a picture of what sort of odd things you can do with thread titles regardless:

 

It's ocel0t to meet you-

Very good thread thank you fish

 

Why is max char limit of so low I feel like it should be higher

 

Wait. The ARG one.

Spoiler: Another guess as to what it is

Doesn't that refer to the pre-Gavel ARG where random posts had letters replaced with links and there was a Wynnic Cipher involved?

Edit: reading WithTheFish' post, I find it extra hilarious that

Spoiler: like it's really funny that

It was a semi-joke but it turns out there was an actual thing like that

To clarify.

Spoiler: Explanation for the ARG

Pre-Wipe (I think it was back then?) there were a whole bunch of Gavel teasers - including "The Puzzle." Random letters across the forums (in members' posts) were replaced with links. It was really long and confusing, but as a result we discovered the Wynnic Cipher all the way in 2015, before it was even in the server

 

Pre-Xenforo forums was primitive and was basically a standard example of early 2010s clunky forum software. I only posted there a few times before the forums shifted to Xenforo, but I clearly remember there was only one default forum theme that made the entire background brown/had a dirt texture. It may have featured artwork by @Luxio but I can't confirm that. There weren't many sections, I think there was one for Wynncraft, one for Minecraft, one for questions, one off-topic section, and finally one for announcements. There may or may not have been a VIP Plaza-type section since I could not remember if there was any, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was one anyways, since that was years before EULA went into effect so ranked players were granted privileges basically everywhere.

Posting wise, it wasn't any different compared to modern day forums - you can still stylize text (2010s forum software may be primitive, but it wasn't that crude) and upload images through Imgur links and whatnot. There was a reputation system (can't remember if it was 'likes' or some other form of point system) and the pre-Xenforo forums was all in all pretty popular, since it was the only platform for server-related mass communication.


Also, forum conversations used to be the go-to "group chat" for users sharing the same interest, and also for guilds, all before Discord was a thing anyways. For example, I'm still in a 153-member conversation that has since died out after 99% of the participants became inactive.

Anyways, yeah, you get the idea.

 

Some stuff i remember from way back in the day:

Gelbin Craftedmovie number station
bottom text

B)

=== Art related stuff ===

Old old forums were illustrated by me :0 they were hella dark oooooo spooky (as in the color palettes were hella dim)

The very old forums had an achievement system that tracked your likes/posts/ratios/etc and they had cool art of a minecraft chicken getting old

There was another artist before me that worked on wynn and made a stony logo i would use as inspiration for first wynn logo

===

Media Kit 2.0 has almost all of the release wynn website stuff that ive made :D

===

Salted is a Binch references >:)

===

 

Thanks @Bart (MC) and @WithTheFish ! I really like these obscure facts about Wynn and the forums . It was nice reading them, although I should probably have learned for my exam tomorrow...

________________________________

found it, I think

 

Someone make a yt vid of this

 

Good job!

Yeah, I don't even recognize almost all of these, me still a newbie!

Yeah, sadly forgetting the people that like to bypass the 10 posts requirement with spam just to get into guilds. Oh well, still looks great!

 

Lmao, I remember that Homestuck thing. A lot of my forums friends had profile pictures from Homestuck, names from Homestuck and spoke exactly like the characters they were representing. It actually got kind of annoying, I remember at least a dozen notable members were "Homestuck-ified" back then. Mostly from the Imperial guild

 

Alright, since no one seems to have figured it out yet:

"Mexico Banned From Selling Nintendo Products" refers to the titular thread made in late 2018. Despite having 14 replies and being about a mundane topic, is it has over 30K views. Judging by the fact that some people have commented on that thread, and nowhere else, along with the insane view count, I have reason to believe this thread was one of the top search results on search engines for this topic at one point. Searching it up on google (on a browser that has never been used to view anything wynn-related) seems to reinforce this.

So, why is this on the iceberg? Because this is, to my knowledge, the ONLY time the wynncraft forums have surfaced into the "wider internet" for something unrelated to a wynncraft advertisement. Sure, Linus Tech Tips showed the website map or something in one of his videos (I think), but this feels to me like the only time the forums have really gone public. It feels like it should be a monumental occasion but no one ever talks about it. But who knows, maybe this has happened more often, or there's something else I'm missing here.