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File:Gamefaqs.jpg
GameFAQs' main page in September, 2004

GameFAQs is a popular website about video games that has helped gamers through "FAQs" and "walkthroughs" for games since November 1995. It was started and is maintained by Jeff "CJayC" Veasey. It has the second largest database of video games on the Internet, behind IGN. . The systems and games range from the 8-bit Atari days to the Next-Gen consoles of today. The site supplies FAQs, guides, images, codes, game saves, reviews, and game data free of charge to anyone who visits the site. Registration allows access to the extremely active message board community (which has posted over 180 million messages in over 17 million topics by over 1.5 million users) and the ability to contribute.

GameFAQs Culture

GameFAQs is noteworthy for its active message board community. As a result, messages on the boards are purged every day, keeping the total number of posts to reasonable levels. Below are minor descriptions of some its more famous boards:

(Note: Karma is a representation of a user's status. One, and only one, karma can be gained per day if the user logs in.)

Most well-known

  • Another Place (AP) is a GameFAQs Social Board created when LUE's user level requirement went up to 31. AP is definitely not a part of LUE anymore, and has somewhat of a tightly-knit community. There are many social topics around and is known by its inhabitants as "Your GameFAQs home for polygamy and wit." Some of AP's residents have made their first names known to the board and ask to be addressed by them. AP also has its own, semi-official website containing a set of guidelines, quotes, and a member list, or APe list.
  • Current Events (CE) is the oldest social board on GameFAQs. It is usually the second most popular social board on GameFAQs.
  • Life, the Universe, and Everything (LUE) is the most popular GameFAQs Social Board with usually well over 50,000 posts at any time, quite a remarkable number given the frequent purging of old posts. The name was derived from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. It was originally created to provide a place to discuss such things as religion and existence. LUE has been very controversial in GameFAQs history, and is often viewed as one of the worst boards on the site. Discussion today is usually sex-related and has been for years. LUE is also home to many fads, including the infamous LUEshi (an ASCII image of Mario riding Yoshi created by the user Patamon), and the phrase "y helo thar", which was said on a live broadcast of Conan O'Brien.
    • Though the board used to be open to all members with 30 Karma, it was raised to 75 Karma following the "Scum Wars" around November 2002. A 150 Karma requirement was implemented after the "RevoLUEtion" on May 7th, 2003, and soon after the board was removed from all board listings. To get to it, one had to manually type in the URL and/or add it to one's favorite board list.
    • On November 15 2003, following a massive LiveJournal invasion by LUE, CJayC "sterilized" LUE by forbidding any user with a user ID greater than 888113 from ever reaching LUE. The last person to ever get into LUE, Lunarhawk99, was hailed as "The One" and regarded as a celebrity. Soon after, from January 4th to January 15th, CJayC ran a sign-up for LUE; people that haven't signed up aren't allowed to visit the board. This was done to prevent any new members from visiting and to permanently remove banned users. In exchange, LUE was granted slightly more leeway when it comes to controversial topics.
    • The LUE Trinity (sometimes referred to as the "unholy trinity") is the term for the three most commonly posted shock sites on GameFAQs - Goatse, Tubgirl, and the Harlequin Fetus. "Goatse" and "Tubgirl" are autoflagged words, and it is now a major offense to provide links to the sites.
  • Random Insanity (RI) was originally created to shunt the less-serious users off of CE. It quickly became host to text-based roleplaying and "social topics" where people could come in and talk about nothing in particular. One of the most popular of these is Pikadeth's Playhouse, which spawned many imitators. Originally RI was slightly hostile towards CE (the origin of "board invasion" being a ToS violation), with the RICE wars being remembered by the "old RIers". RI also has a history of being competitive with LUE; in the early days, users would perform "raids" on LUE in the PM hours. Before the RI Refugee Crisis it usually had twice the number of posts on CE and LUE combined. However, after the incident most of them migrated to LUE.
    • RI had many dramas and traditions of its own, including roleplaying, which started on the board and later moved to RP/FF. Gaw's Laws, a set of rules for roleplaying popularly used at the site, originated at RI. Today, roleplaying is somewhat of a niche, with social topics and one-liners dominating instead. RI has often had problems accepting new users, with resistance coming from "veterans" -- users who, while not necessarily there for very long, tried to establish standards on the "randomly insane" board. One event that still resonates with even the newest users is the Gamequeen incident.

Less well-known

  • The Couch, The Hallway, The Porch, and The Forum are "forum" message boards for general chitchat, with The Couch being the largest among them.
  • Game Design and Programming is a board where people can discuss programming concepts and code. The veterans at this board usually look down on "Game Makers", especially the illegal English version of RPG Maker, focusing instead on making the games using OpenGL and SDL. There are even a couple of professional video game programmers who hang out at this board.
  • Message Board Help is the unofficial complaint forum of the boards. If a user feels something is wrong with the moderation system or staff, or possibly a board error, it is usually reported here. It is also used to ask questions about board features. This board was named Questions and Suggestions until the Karma system was introduced. After that, all suggestions and petitions have gone to Site Suggestions.
  • Poll of the Day (PotD) is another social board, similar to LUE, although the topics there are not usually as bad. PotD has nothing particular in common with the Poll of the Day on the main page, and is usually used to discuss women, love, etc.
  • Review Contributors is the board for all the review writers to talk about common interests. This board has been split to better categorize the discussions on it. It is now composed out of three boards: General, Help and Critiques, and Social.
  • Special Boards are hard to find because one has to type their board numbers (found in parentheses) manually in the address bar. The boards are: Spatula (622), Board 250 (250), Brilliant (-1), Spork (542), Eggbeater (486), Semprini (709), Jenny (8675309), Pie (314159265), Rnd() (123456789), Nine (9), Lame (20040401), Toaster Oven (909090909), and Angela (8535937). In all of these boards one can usually find topics that are used for karma raising by many users, even though such topics are no longer necessary. Toaster Oven in particular had been rumored to exist for years, and was finally created by CJayC along with Rnd(), Nine, and Lame as the April Fool's Joke for 2004. Angela was created along with Jenny, but very few knew about it until recently.
  • Site Suggestions is the official petitioning board, though very few ever pass. Usually passed petitions are a new special interest or social board, though very occasionally a new feature might be added.
  • Summer Contest is the board where people talk about the Summer Character Contest, a huge event at GameFAQs. This board has evolved since 2002 for the most part independently from the other boards mentioned. One well-known event on these boards has happened 2 years in a row, directly after Crono's loss to Mario in both tournaments, each by around 100 votes. Mass account suicides, flaming/trolling, and even accusations of CJayC cheating ensued for days after both times. This board is also known for the constant flame wars between certain groups of users, and the word "fanboy" is horribly overused. During the Spring of 2004, the board name changed to represent the Spring Best Game Ever contest, but it is normally under its Summer Contest moniker.
  • 810-819 Boards were created a few days after April Fool's Day. Originally, CJayC posted on the Icon board (1000 karma requirement) on April Fools Day about making private boards for the first few icons that signed up. Many thought it an April Fool's joke until these boards were actually created. The few people that received these boards also are allowed to name them. So far, the ones that have been named are: 810 (Mostly Harmless), 813 (Unnatural Selection), 814 (The Upper Room), 816 (#showarr), 818 (KGB), and 819 (CE Reloaded). In order to access these boards, the founders must send an invite.
  • Secret Boards are game boards where off-topic posting is allowed. This is generally because the systems the games belong to have become so antiquated and obsolete that very little genuine discussion would otherwise take place on them. Many GameFAQsers have adopted some of these boards for their own use. The systems whose game boards are secret boards are found in the KSOT FAQ.

GameFAQs Spinoff/Clone Boards

Many people have created their own sites based upon the GameFAQs look and feel. Most of these simply copy the GameFAQs boards; these are commonly referred to as GameFAQs spinoffs. Some go further, emulating GameFAQs' contribution systems as well.

The first spinoff was called GameFAQs Hell, created by Chuck "NeoGenesis" Sakoda in 2002. His first attempt at cloning the boards was performed in ASP and MS Access database services. After giving up on that, he made a new version in PHP and MySQL. He released the source code under the GNU General Public License. It has been confirmed by CJayC that he had a link to GameFAQs Hell in the board help section for promotion of the source.

Since the GameFAQs Hell time, there have been dozens of other spinoffs opened up, and more sources appeared, including:

  • GameFAQs Hell-based
    • GameFAQs Hell - GameFAQs Hell was the first spinoff, the one that started it all. Originally it was thought that only 3 or 4 releases of the code still existed; since then many more have surfaced. The boards were originally writen in ASP but were never finished and then were abandoned and rewritten in PHP, and were run on a server owned by the boards' creator, Chuck Sakoda. The server (rhn.skwerl.net) contained several source code downloads up until some time in Spring 2004, but later all of the content was deleted.
    • GameFAQsInfo - GameFAQsInfo is one of the newest GameFAQs spinoffs. The original site was started up in April 2004 and hosted by Angelfire. However, the site's owner, Easter Eggs, declared the Angelfire as a "bad host" and in May of the same year moved to a .net domain. The site basically exists to give information on the happenings at GameFAQs although most of the users that register there just use the boards (which are flooded with racism and other offensive material).
    • Mediarchive - Mediarchive was one of the most featureful and popular spinoffs of all time. It contained a contribution system similar to GameFAQs'. The source code was leaked toward the end of its days. The creator, Jay, claims that he would have released it two days later if it weren't leaked by Counteray, the guy who paid for and hosted Mediarchive. The leak of Mediarchive led to many more spinoffs popping up and others adding more features and fixes to MA code.
    • Outboards - The oldest spinoff remaining in existence, founded in August 2002. It currently uses a heavily modified version of Mediarchive by Jay and Outbreakorn. Over time, it has been the subject of controversy due to staff-encouraged 'invasions' of other spinoffs as well as controversial discussion content.
    • Special Ops - The owner of Special Ops, Anthony "Ant P" Parsons, started hacking at GameFAQs Hell in April 2003 to make it more GameFAQs-like and remove severe exploits and bugs in the original GameFAQs Hell. It contains several major new features and is XHTML-compliant, The site design is noticeably biased against Internet Explorer users, with its extensive use of modern web standards such as CSS 2/3 and transparent PNG images.
    • Twisted Legacy - Twisted Legacy is the third oldest spin-off still in existence, created in late September 2002 as a refuge for GameFAQs "The Couch" members. It has flourished since then, with many source improvements, made formerly by Aquatakat and now by Insder. While the source still has some bugs in it, it has been drastically changed since its Outboards 2 (GFH-Based) beginnings.
    • whiteFyre - whiteFyre is the second oldest spinoff in existence, started in September 2002 by ultimategamer00. It is the first spinoff to truly have the appearance of the actual GameFAQs boards, as much of the GameFAQs HTML was directly copied. The source code was leaked following a break-in using code exploits on August 8 2003 (a similar attack was made exactly one year later), and ultimateGamer's official release followed six months later in February 2004.
  • Original Source - This is a list of spinoffs not based off of GameFAQs Hell (most are closed-source, thus derivatives of them are few, if any)
    • Archetype Zero - A very feature-rich spinoff that contains several features from Special Ops, whiteFyre, and some unique to Archetype Zero. It was started in January 2004 and became open source in July 2004. The boards closed down at the end of September 2004.
    • Eugenic GameFAQs Clone - Written by the creator of Archetype Zero, this was intended to be as complete a clone of the new PHP GameFAQs as possible, except using valid XHTML and CSS code. The creator had a conversation with CJayC about it and was given the possibility of having it advertised in the help files as GFH was (see above), but since then work has been discontinued. There are downloads available from the author, as well as on a few other sites below.
    • Flying Turkey - A spinoff that is very user-friendly. It has a lot of options that normal users can do and even more through the shop and higher levels. Flying Turkey is a spinoff with an origin of The Couch made by Magus.
    • GameFAQs Clone X - The first working spinoff written in ASP, although not the first attempt (see section intro). GFCX was the closest to a true GameFAQs spinoff there is, until GameFAQs itself changed from ASP to PHP. The original set of boards were hacked because the owner left the database path in the released source code, and the passwords were unencrypted. The source is available for download at various sites.
    • GameFAQs Clone 2 - A board with an original ASP source that uses the new GameFAQs layout.
    • LUElinks - A private board created by LlamaGuy, only for members of LUE. The interface is similar to that of GameFAQs, but several features are added, most notably the abilities to vote on links and receive tokens for adding good links. There is a running joke among LUElinkers that whenever someone asks for the URL for the board, they all claim that the site does not exist.
    • LUE2 - First GameFAQs spinoff to use the new GameFAQs layout. Originally created by Tsietisin in November 2003 on the day of SteriLUEzation (see site history), for three days it was the largest GameFAQs spinoff to ever exist. After Tsietisin resigned, programmer Mark Lin revived and took over the community in January 2004. After two hackings and numerous shutdowns due to bandwidth overconsumption on the outdated and inefficient Mediarchive software, a new and efficient source code was developed by August 2004 while the original user and post databases were retained.
    • Metaboards - A source code made by U.X.O (also known as Fish and radfox). The purpose was to create a new and "properly coded" version of GameFAQs Hell. It was very active in development for the first three months, however it hasn't received much attention since February 2004, and at version 0.4 has been considered abandoned. All versions of the source have been preserved, some of which still exist on the site's FTP.
    • Radiance - This is an original spinoff with layout similar to Aquatakat's boards. The source is currently moving from MySQL to SQLite under the name of Radiance Revolution.
    • Slate Boards - An original spinoff that uses one PHP file. The source code is stable with no known exploits, but the administration system is lacking compared to others.
    • The Flux Network - The first active spin-off to be based on an OOP design, ns1987 made it because he was tired of the whiteFyre source. Based on GameFAQs Hell Lite, by Ant P.
    • Thunderboards - An almost completely original spinoff still relatively new and the first released spinoff to use SQLite. The owner, lancelott, is more concerned with code perfection than adding more features, so the source is very secure and stable though a bit bare.
    • Turkeybot - The owner of Turkeybot, Tonglebeak, wanted to make "the best spinoff there ever was", with more features and better speed than others. It contains customizable CSS themes like most other spinoffs, added account security, many other features, and claims to never have been hacked.

Anthony Parsons keeps a small archive of free sources for download. A much more complete source collection (though without descriptions) is available at lancelott's directory. There is a list of sources and reviews to accompany them at Slate Boards, however this list is censored to show only negative opinions of other spinoffs. There is also another user-submitted list at Aquatakat's site. The former site of Archetype Zero contains an archived spinoff board listing for historic purposes. None of these sites are entirely up-to-date, due to the rate at which new boards appear and others disappear.

A large former spinoff, Darkside Legion, was a banned word ("darksidelegion") at GameFAQs after receiving a notorious reputation, because its members were said to contact unsuspecting people and persuade them to give his or her password away. Many Mediarchive-based spinoffs have been hacked by spinoff coders. There has been long-standing tension between Outboards and whiteFyre, the two longest-running spinoffs.

See also

External links

Official sites

Unofficial sites

  • SCk24 - A site devoted to covering the GameFAQs contests
  • GameFAQs Users Site
  • Kirby Still On Top's Secondary Boards FAQ - KSOT's Secondary Boards FAQ is recognised by many users as a comprehensive guide to the features and works of the GameFAQs message boards, answering questions and giving factual information that cannot be already found in the Help Files.
  • GameFAQs Photo Album
  • GameFAQs Archive - The GFA is a collection of saved humourous, interesting, and noteworthy topics and messages posted originally on the GameFAQs message boards themselves throughout their illustrious history between the years 1999 and 2004. The Archive was coded and designed by Roaddhogg, originally to serve as a follow-up to ColdFusion's "Nostalgia Project", which became defunct in late 2002. The GameFAQs Archive currently stores in excess of 900 pages and has over 100,000 hits. User submissions are encouraged.

GameFAQs board histories

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