Announcing…

…The first-ever [DFO] Banner Tournament! Yes, it’s been a long time coming, and now that it’s almost March, it’s finally here.

We went through as many banner comments as we could find from the beginning of the site (thanks, Internet Wayback Archive!), including a brand-new archive of current banners (dating from about May or so). From those, we took 64 comments (the First Four is not a real thing) to have them duke it out to be the best banner comment of all time. OF ALL TIME!

Or at least the best one from the first three years of the site. So how’s it gonna work?

Well, the Smarch (s)madness is going to start, well, March 1st. Because March brackets should be done in March for fuck’s sake, I’m looking at you NCAA tournament ending on April 8th! That madness is no longer in March! It rivals October baseball ending in November for the thing that riles me up the most in sports!

Anyway, over the next four days, we’re going to unveil the bracket region by region—BLEERGH, SHAN’KHOR, BOLTMAN, and GAMBLOR—so you all can get reacquainted with the comments that made us laugh, or cry (with laughter), or go “holy shit that is fucked up” (and laugh). Everyone who had a banner comment in the archive? They get into the dance, just like how every conference is represented—however, the comments themselves will not have authors attributed to them, as they should stand on their own merits at this point. Our selection committee (one person can totally be a committee) has done their best. Those of you who had a banner but it wasn’t archived? Sorry about that, we did the best we can but not every banner got archived because the Internet Wayback Machine only screenshots every so often. If you screencapped it, please send it over and we’ll see if we can add it for next year’s tournament. Those of you who haven’t made the banner yet? Keep at it, I haven’t made it either.

How do comments advance? That’s a good question. The answer is YOU. You get to vote for the comments, and you have say on which comments taste glory or… not, I guess? Every day there’ll be polls on the sidebar, so look out for them. Each day’s polls will only be open for 24 hours (this may change for the later rounds because I need the time to tally and post results) to make way for the next day’s matchups.

So hang tight, and starting tomorrow, we see what’s up!