I think this is the 5th edition of threads titled ‘The Like and Get Likes Thread’.
When CCP first activated ‘LIKES’ in the old old forums, the original thread was posted in General Discussion to show how easily the Like system could be manipulated. I’m not sure but I think it was shut down and then later restarted in Out Of Pod Experience.
Anyway, in September 2011 this thread ‘The Likes and Get Likes Thread’ eventually turned into more of a general-chat thread while still adhering to the topic of giving and receiving likes. It became a major Threadnaut with 156,265 replies posted, the last reply was posted by CCP Logibro on 10-20-2015:
Due to the excessive size of this thread, for the good of the forum’s health we must lay it to rest. The spirit of the thread will live on though, in the new thread here.
CCP Logibro then created a new thread on 10-20-2015 called ‘The Like and Get Likes Thread, Renewed’ and posted this:
Due to the old thread becoming excessively large to the point of being detrimental to the forum’s health, it has been locked and will in time be relegated to the archives. However, the spirit of the thread is allowed to live on, in this new reborn thread.
One thing I remember is that most people would start liking replies from the beginning, then after a while would jump to the last page and start again there, chatting and dispensing Likes. A few players did LIKE every single post which took quite a while to complete. One in particular was a player named Falken Falcon, the dedication that player showed inspired the phrase ‘Do The Falcon’ which was usually said to all new-comers entering the thread.
On 2-20-2017 CCP DeNormalized visited the thread and posted this reply:
Soooooo…
Guess which forum thread is consuming the most resources on the DB server??
I’ll give you a hint, it’s almost this one: What would you say if you woke up to the Avatar above you in your bed? - Out of Pod Experience - EVE Online Forums
A few posts later on 2-20-2017 CCP Logibro once again visited the thread and posted the 12,019 reply:
Due to the large size of this thread, for the good of the forum’s health we must lay it to rest. The spirit of the thread will live on though, in the new thread here.
CCP Logibro then started the 3rd thread edition called ‘The Like and Get Likes Thread - Renewed (Again)’ and posted this:
Due to the old new-thread becoming large to the point of being detrimental to the forum’s health, it has been locked and will in time be relegated to the archives. However, the spirit of the thread is allowed to live on, in this new reborn thread.
When asked why the old new-thread was locked when there were other threads still active in the forums with more replies posted, CCP DeNormalized posted this on 2-20-2017:
The org. thread was the worst offender in our monitoring history, so we keep an eye on it’s evil spawns
But you are right, there are others that we’re considering splitting as well.
In regards to performance, it’s primarily the amount of Reads that happen to calculate all the likes… While the DB Server has 768 GB of ram, it’s not just the forums that use it, so when things like this thread (or well the old threads) take silly amounts of reads to do things, it just makes us sad
On 08-03-2017 the old Forums were shut down and the last reply by Nana Skalski made a total of 3,194 posts in that thread.
For a while there was an overlap of time between the start of these new Discourse Forums and shutting down the old Forums so both forums were active.
On 6-20-2017 CCP Logibro created the 4th edition of The Like and Get Likes Thread in these new Discourse Forums with this post:
Since I technically started the last two of these, I thought I should continue the tradition. Hopefully with the new forums you guys won’t manage to make the database cry quite as much.
Post a post and get likes.
So the thread continued but after a while it became chaotic with no sense of conversation in it at all. Just a bunch of one liners and spamming of animated Gif’s. I visited it a couple of times but it took too much time to load on my computer so I gave up on it.
Eventually that thread got so huge that CCP activated a thread reply cap of 10,000 replies to these forums which auto-locked that thread on 4-17-2018. Total amount of replies in that thread became 13,392 when CCP Falcon posted this on 6-20-2018:
LAST POST - LEL