There really are too many things that happened here. Three and a half years of posts is a long time, I don't even know where to begin, and I'll forget a lot of stuff for sure.
First, I was surprised we didn't talk about Nikola Tesla (the poster) in the first pages, around the time of his death. Those days the community was by and large the chat (much like today, I guess), and I remember talking about it there, so I guess that's where it stayed.
We had plenty of religion debates, but the last one was my favorite. It's probably been more than a year since we had it, but what I remember was that people generally kept their cool and we had a great conversation despite the debate getting heated.
We've seen a lot of posters go in and out of the forums.
@Eggers was getting along really well with everyone here, but suddenly stopped posting.
@Prime has been around since before this CT started, if I'm not mistaken, together with
@running_in_jam,
@DarkDepths,
@Bimkoblerutso, and
@CyanPrime, among others I'm forgetting. But of them, only Cyan posts anymore.
@nyarlathotep5 and
@-BooM-BooM- have been in and out, as have many others.
@repomech has been telling me that crepes are a subset of the pancake family for nearly 3 years now. But I don't care, they look so delicious they deserve their own mention.
The Mario icons have been around for nearly as long as this CT, by the way. They just fell out of style when we moved to phpBB and later vanilla forums.
On that note, the freaking forums have been through a lot of changes. First we had some POS super basic boards that looked like they were the first internet forums ever made, by some dude in his lunch break at work, even. Then we went from that to myBB forums. Those were freaking badass, in fact, at the time they were FAR ahead of what IGN had (before they moved to xenforo), let alone what we had. But they weren't easy for us to work with on the tech side (that was back when DarkDepths was our only tech guy and was doing the heavy lifting around here), so we switched to phpBB, which weren't quite as good but were still pretty solid, and were easier to mess with. Those were pretty comfy forums, but eventually we moved to vanilla, I don't remember why exactly. Vanilla was probably really nice on the tech side, but I really disliked it as a poster, it required too much work to get posts to look ok. Admittedly, vanilla forced me to get comfortable with CSS and HTML, so that's something good that came out of that. And of course we finally moved here to Xenforo, which have been my favorite boards of all that we've had.
Anyway, yeah this CT has seen a lot of action. I could open any random page here and get lost in whatever conversation was going on at that time. I love that this CT can get deep into any conversation or debate for a couple of days, then go back to normalcy the next day. If I had to describe this CT, I'd say it feels like the true home of TNE. It hasn't always been pretty out there in the front page, or the chat, or the skype groups. But this CT has always felt welcoming and I've never had a bad time in here.