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Comment by gryson | Hacker News Reader

A clue as to the origins of the Zero Wing translation in this interview with Masahiro Yuge of Toaplan:

>-Toaplan also ported Zero Wing to the Megadrive. Who came up with the broken English “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US” from the overseas attract mode?

>Yuge: It may have been this guy who was in charge of our exports at the time. He was always having business meetings with people from overseas, and I went to a few of them myself, and his English was really terrible (laughs).

http://shmuplations.com/toaplan-yuge1/

And you can see the original All Your Base thread posted by Bad_CRC archived here on Tribal War (all image links are dead, though):

http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=2453...

I can remember when this was posted on Tribal War and the deluge of mediocre photoshops that it generated. Back then, your internet cred was measured in your photoshop ability. Good times.

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There's a bittersweet nostalgia in finding any web-forum where you can see your own account with an ancient last-posted date.

As usual XKCD has this covered:

https://xkcd.com/2363/

They’re still arguing about SNES vs Genesis / Megadrive on rec.games.video.nintendo. Some threads seem to go back 20 years.

Except sadly the xkcd forums themselves were wiped from the internet.

Why did that happen?

The took them offline after a security breach, and they never came back. https://www.engadget.com/2019-09-03-xkcd-forum-breach-expose...

As have too many others. It fills me with the same sadness as deforestation.

Wow, from another era. I miss these random vBulletin forums, they were pretty ubiquitous back in the day. There were other 90s memes at the time, like dancing baby, hamster dance, etc. But this is definitely one of the earliest examples I can remember of this sort of emergent creative collaboration.

I wonder if kids these days appreciate how novel photoshop was at the time. That was at least part of the hilarity of the meme.

I recently started interacting with a vBulletin forum (https://www.bentrideronline.com/messageboard/). It’s just as bad as I remember from all those years ago. Bad layout, bad markup so that it’s difficult for me to make it nicer in user stylesheets (most notably, I want to make it more compact), a bad HTTP/HTTPS situation, unreasonably tight restrictions (e.g. “you can’t post links until you’ve posted 15 messages”), crazy pagination and thread organisation behaviour which prevents you from having meaningful persistent links (“?page=4” is hopeless when it depends on the user’s comments-per-page and linear-or-threaded settings), and other weird defaults (e.g. pretend threads from over a year ago don’t exist, unless you opt into seeing them; or showing only 10 comments per page by default, with the maximum being only 40), defaulting replies to a quote-everything style… it’s just not nice to deal with, even apart from using that old relic BBCode (thank goodness for the “preview” option, anyway—it’s essential). Unfortunately, all the alternatives I know of are irritating in their own ways too (e.g. Discourse is far too spacious, loads slowly, and has painful lazy loading).

Restrictions are not that unreasonable when you consider web forums are massive spam targets.

But I agree web forums were successful despite their implementations. There was (and arguably there still is) a primal thirst for communication among people, that will drive demand for social software likely forever.

My own observation from acting as a moderator in a couple of places over the years is that the first post of an account is almost always sufficient to tell whether an account is a spammer or not. I would say that a better approach would be to moderate users’ first posts—or perhaps to do spam analysis and moderate any that are not overwhelmingly ham. But even without that, requiring fifteen messages before allowing links is going well beyond what could be argued as helping with spam protection.

Haha, yeah, I'm not saying there shouldn't be better alternatives and that I miss vBulletin itself. I just miss the communities and how interesting they all were. Had high hopes for Discourse, it's unfortunate the performance isn't there.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010331112908/http://www.tribalw... seems to have a lot of the original images.

> and his English was really terrible (laughs).

I have been (and still am) an avid consumer of Japanese animation of the late 70s and 80s

This kind of things happened a lot back then, I have collected over the years screens of the translation errors I have encountered, mostly because they are gloriously fun

an example (from Uchū Senshi Barudiosu): https://i.postimg.cc/Kzn6GCWb/image.png

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