by Zed

This was back when I was an admin. If I remember correctly this all came about because of another off-hand discussion in the Chat Thread about how no one really appreciates the work that the moderators do. Mantha created a thread pretending to have finally snapped and called for a general strike amongst the moderators until they were paid an adequate wage for the work they put in. In response I created a thread calling for volunteers to join the SPP Militia - a group of members who would be given some mod powers to keep the forum clean whenever the mods weren't up to the task or were refusing to do it.

The threads all got destroyed in the reset, but I remember Index, Devour, and Ashlander were all militia members, Index and Devour not having been promoted to full mods at the time. The militia folks got fancy pink names (mods were green back then) but I never actually gave them powers - they were just a (joking) threat to Mantha that she had better get her act together because she wasn't irreplaceable.

The fun didn't stop there though. In order to give the militia their coloured usernames I had to create a new usergroup for them. After the fuss with the fake strike had died down and we'd all had a good laugh, I decided not to remove those guys from the group (although I did change the usernames back). They were all responsible active members and I thought they might be genuinely useful to have around if we got another wave of spambots and it became worthwhile to give them post-deleting powers. However, me being an idiot, I didn't get the group permissions quite right.

There was, at the time (and maybe there still is), below the Trash Can at the very bottom of the forums, a hidden section. My memory is pretty hazy, but I believe it was the Portal Submissions section - a redundant section of the forums which hadn't been needed since the portal was taken down in 2009, which was hidden from regular users rather than being deleted. The only people supposed to be able to see that section were the admins. And I was the only admin. And I never thought it necessary to scroll further down the page than the Trash Can. And I accidentally let the militia in. It took me about two weeks to notice that the New Threads icon was lit up down there. The militia had turned it into a porn section.

I gave access to the moderators and we changed our sigs and avatars into SWAT team pictures before raiding the section and banning the whole militia. It was a lot of fun.

by Hewitt:
http://forums.stickpage.com/showthread.php?85725-TOP-MODS-Thanks-for-Playing-Hewitt-s-Challenge

TOP Mods was an innocuous little poll thread started by DragonCurse in the middle of 2014. It was meant to be your average poll thread where users voted for their favorite Mod. For awhile, the results were pretty even but the fact that Camila was a spunky sexy Mod caused her to become the perfect demographic for horny kids on the site. This soon proved that her "popularity" would give a significant boost of 10+ votes when everyone else was struggling with 2-5 votes.

Not wanting to be upstaged by that, Hewitt decided to step in and modify the results to give himself 99 votes. This in turn earned the slight annoyance of some but the enjoyment of many as they thoroughly pictured Hewitt as the trickster god that he is. And heeding the attention of his fellow mortals, he decided to offer a "fair" challenge: if any of the other given Mods have over 30 votes, he will gladly retract his 99 ones and secede the crown to the winning mod. Now keep in mind that poll threads barely get over 20 voters on average, so this was a nigh impossible feat.

Upon hearing this, Crank---who was a Writer's Lounge regular---sought to rally all the dormant/lurking writers in the WL to get acutelatios (the WL's resident Mod) up in the polls. For awhile it was slow and steady and nigh impossible, and after consistent taunting by Hewitt, Crank managed to overcome the odds and boost acutelatios from a middling 2-3 votes to a whopping 32, easily beating the voluptous Camila by over 50%! It would seem that the impossible was reached and Hewitt the god was humiliated in turn.

Knowing he was beat fair and square, Hewitt reversed his 99 fake votes. And then...Hewitt revealed his trump card: that this was his plan the entire time. He wanted to give acutelatios something special for being a mod of lesser renown. acutelatios herself confirms this.

And thus not a single shit was wasted. In the end, Camila was never able to come out on top...just as originally planned.

by Hewitt:

The Thread that Started it All

It was October, 2014. General Section was a WASTELAND. Partially caused by the mandate to remove all minor "meaningless" chatter and only post them in the Chat Thread during The Merge, nobody was making good threads anymore save for the occasional Forum Game (and a ton of crappy ones). Thus Exilement proposed an experiment and after permission from the mods and Jeff, decided to do the unthinkable: lock the Chat Thread. The idea was that if you wanted to talk about "random things", General Section was the only place to do it.

At first everyone complained, but the General Section soon saw a resurgence in casual random threads both of the Movies and Games variety, if not actual random chatter. Threads ranged from the comical to serious, from the random to the specific whereby members of SP got together to get to know each other better. 2 Weeks later, the Chat Thread resurfaced and comments were mixed but it was generally agreed upon that the locking did more good than harm and that it was a fun little phase that ought to be done again soon.

This event was also significant for reinstating Exilement as a mod. He was initially sired to oversee this event but soon became the Debate Section Mod soon after.