Today marks the passing of exactly one year since the OSR Pit started up!
Some backstory
About a year and a half ago, I was spending a lot of time on the friendly Runehammer forums, discussing one of my favorite games, ICRPG. However my interest had been captured by the OSR and I dived into it. The gritty, player-agency driven gameplay really spoke to me. I was mostly too late for the G+ era, and though Reddit and Discord are great, I wanted somewhere to have more long-form discussions on. After posting about the idea of a new G+ esque website on a few places in the internet, a lot of people reached out to me and told me they were interested. I really didn’t know much about the tech details of creating a website, but I forged ahead and set up a functioning Discourse forum. It was then that I reached out to fellow admin @thekernelinyellow, who I met on a OSR discord server, for some help with CSS to customize the tile layout of the forums.
Cool Stats
Over the course of the past year, the website saw a whopping 255,633 pageviews (excluding crawlers), or an average of 350 per day.
329 people signed up with new accounts, 496 topics were created, 3.9k posts were written, and 9.0k likes were given out!
The three most liked topics are: @LF_OSR Art Corner, Artwork for OSE, Art and adjacent by Perplexing Ruins.
The most commented topic is: The Big Introductions Thread
The oldest account, beside me @thekernelinyellow is @Archons_Court , who registered on the 11th.
Also shout out to @quantum_metaphysics, the only user to have gotten to Trust Level 3 in the past year!
Personal highlights
Running this forum has been a really rewarding experience. I’ve read a lot of interesting posts, met new people, and got to collaborate with a lot of creative individuals. Seeing heavyweights like @QuestingBeast , @pjamesstuart and @WizardThiefFighter in my website was really awesome. I also want to thank everyone who participates here for being extremely civil, courteous, and nice. Moderating this site has been a breeze, and I like to think this place has a really welcoming and cozy vibe.
The OSR Pit Zine
However, the OSR Pit Zine definitely takes the cake for my favorite thing about the website this past year. Originally proposed by @KnightOwl, the Pit community came together to create a 40 page collaborate zine. This was the first time I had ever worked on anything like this, and I ended up doing the page layout for the project. Seeing this come together was a lot of fun, and I’m excited to do something like this again. If you want to check out the finished product: free pdf / print.
Vote on your favorite topic of the past year!
To celebrate the first anniversary of this site, we decided to host a small contest. Me and @thekernelinyellow have curated some of the best topics of the past year, and want y’all to vote for your favorite one. The winning topic’s creator will be getting a special Community favorite badge!
A big thank you to EVERYONE who has participated on this website, and I look forward to another great year on the Pit.
