[astrange]

The history of SA was all very interesting. There was a culture of very long decent posts I always wondered how to replicate - you still have the user base with too much free time these days, but they might have too many demands on their attention span.

In 2000 or so, SA was set up as a sea of quality in an internet whose users really weren't ready to be good forum posters. (Like: children, racists, perverts, really angry teenagers, people with signatures of anime characters holding huge swords, furries) The anime forum was opened because nobody else wanted to read the threads, but they mostly left it alone.

As the years went on quality went down as the user base got too large, so the admins started effectively a left-wing death squad called Helldump dedicated to finding reasons to ban everyone. It was pretty puritanical in the American sense, so nearly all the long time anime posters got banned for being "probably a pedophile". One person I knew was banned for a slightly too sexy image posted 10 years before and had since become the pilot of Marine One. It's a little surprising they were never sued for libel.

SA inspired the rarely-used "user was banned for this post" label, but mostly showed the importance of not having a post history.