Rules
With the lack of activity in this forum, I don't expect anyone to really pick this up, but it should now be possible thanks to the fact that it's now technically just another part of the forum. So on that note, any Admin/mod will still enforce rules:
- First post must contain only a single image using the forum attachment system* and must feature El-Hazard characters; it can be a reposted screenshot from the show or something more creative. NSFW worse than what was on the show is most likely inappropriate.
- Don't post an actual reference to the screenshot (that's not funny!) and don't post general commentary (at least not without attempting to "play")
* The reason for using the forum attachment system is control -- this game is based on one I had found years ago on another defunct El-Hazard forum, but in that case the images posted by users were on a variety of hosts and many of the images were missing, which of course ruins the humor!Note that this forum section, unlike the others, is currently set to show these posts in date order. That means new replies do not bump a thread to the top. I'm kind of on the fence about this because it means new replies will generally go unnoticed (except the RSS feed?) but it does preserve the original ordering of the PoTMs.
History
"Pic of the Moment" was a "game" that existed on later versions of the El-Hazard site where we'd post a screenshot (and later image collages to keep it interesting) out of context and see what people could come up with. Originally, much like the rest of the site before it was Wiki-fied, this was powered by a custom, in-house set of Perl-CGI scripts. When the rest of the site was brought online as a Wiki, PoTM was still being rendered using the archaic site-side scripts. (And, until last night, was a gateway backward into the old content, which was interesting to say the least.) Furthermore, while the old Perl-CGI website integrated a user login with the former YaBB forum, the shift to the current SMF forum broke that old system and I saw no need to fix it, making replies to PoTMs impossible.
Having both the Wiki and old site content essentially meant that we were holding two versions of the website, one dormant. (And that's an understatement because various pieces of previous incarnations of the website actually still existed in the old labyrinth of directories!) Since nothing else from the old site was going to be used anymore, and that reverse gateway would just be confusing to new visitors, I finally got the nerve to delete all remains of the pre-Wiki version of the website, and wrote a Perl script to import all of the old "Pic of the Moment" images and posts into the forum here. Granted it's not a perfect transition, and also explains why all threads are posted by the imaginary "PoTM" user and all replies have the same date as the original posting due to lack of per-reply date tracking in the old system.
This strange "Pic of the Moment" PoTM is incidentally a screenshot of how it used to look! (What were we thinking by posting that one though?)
