Kel is Sleipnir's Forum's currency, generated from activity and donations between users. This fact has generally gone unnoticed by the majority of the current active user base that joined the forum the past couple of years, and there's a good reason for that.Another feature that's evidently been overlooked by the vast majority, including myself until recently, is that this forum has a custom theme tab located to the very bottom right of the screen. I say vast majority because when I take a look at Forum Themes in the 'Statistics' tab above, it gives us some interesting numbers:
http://www.sleipnirstuff.com/forum/statistics.php
I'm currently using the subSilver theme which makes me part of the 0%
Like an archaeologist looking for ancient sites and artifact I recently delved into the depths of the old forum activities, some dating as far back as April 11 2002 in which the forum appeared to go online and what I've seen is more akin to discovering an ancient lost civilization. Most users has at some point likely taken a peak at the Forum index. It includes a few semi-active topics such as modding topics, artwork, written stories and others and then there's other topics that's been inactive for years, including one called 'Triple Triad', an online card trading forum themed for Final Fantasy 8 with 1166 posts, the last post dated at September 28, 2008. All in all, these now more or less inert topics totals 130.453 posts. For comparison, the semi-active Modding section totals 89.279 posts. The OpenRA section, which is by far the most active section since at least 2012 (when I registered on the forum) totals "only" 12.327 posts from the topic's arrival sometime in September 2010. Sleipnir himself totals 3957 posts, almost 1/3 of the total posts by all users in OpenRA!
Btw for those who don't know, Sleipnir is pchote, OpenRA's most active developer together with chrisforbes, commonly found on OpenRA's IRC and Github: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/graphs/contributors
There's a lot of names to go through on the forum's member's list pages, sorted by total posts, before you will find any familiar names active in the forums besides Sleipnir. At one moment I thought to have found chrisf's profile before I checked the history found his last post from July 13 2010 saying "Not only that, the forum strangely loads so downright slow. Visiting SS again makes me cry
" http://www.sleipnirstuff.com/forum/memb ... ile&u=1096EDIT: I actually found Cmd.Matt (developer) at #70 with 896 posts since May 1st 2012 and noobmapmaker (OpenRA promoter) at #107 with 440 posts since December 10 2014! Way to go!
Evidently this forum was once a great hub for a couple thousand users sharing interests that many of the current active user base has never even heard of. Looking at we've got today, having this forum for OpenRA to share ideas, organize and generally just have a good time, I feel nothing but great appreciation for Sleipnir/pchote and other old guard users that I've probably failed to mention, that has kept this forum open to avail to us all these great venues. If not reaching the height of the forums' activity as in the past I'm hoping to see the OpenRA activity and community continue to grow and support greater accomplishments that OpenRA has yet to reach and hoping that the old guard community members enjoy to see the great joy and passion that so many of us "newbies" share in this place.
)