Mess Hall

The Mess Hall is the most visited place on GAJ. It is the place where people come to just chill and chat about whatever they want to talk about. They are pretty much given free reign here, with the exception of the few rules in place.

Topics in the Mess Hall
The Mess Hall started off with many topics that came and went, but the first topic that stuck around and was the first series of topics to recurr was the Mansion topics. It was about a mansion where people did stuff, and and randomness could take place.

Announcements used to be posted in there too, which were auto sticked. This was before a seperate Announcements board was made.

A Game Reviews topic was begun, and many many people posted various random reviews on widely varied games from all genres; ranging from the simple 7/10 to the well thought out review masterpieces.

Soon, once an old user called MasterJedi made a topic which showed a site with free useable smileys, stories utilising these in them. The first of these were Ghost's Smile Wars, a Star Wars inspired story using smileys as illustration.

The next majorly read story was made by a user Matt44au, called James Smile. Defenitely the most successful of those stories; it spawned 2 novella sized sequels, but with no smileys.

When GAJ2 started, Decoy made an early topic calling for all newbies to the boards to introduce themselves. This has survived to this day, and is stickied.

The game review topic also came back around this time, with a less successful movie rating topic alongside it. Both were subsequently stickied.

Controversy
One day, the Mess Hall topics and posts reached the milestone of 3 times larger than all of the other Jack boards combined. This aggrevated the admins and which spurred a campaign to get people to actually care about GAJ's mission: To stop Jack Thompson and raise awareness of the true nature of games. Bloodlust555666 tried to revitalise some interest by gathering all the info she could find on the subject and practically spamming the crap out of Jack Attack with it. The affects of this were felt for about a week, but the lure of the Mess Hall was still too great. A new rule was then instigated: 1 post in the Jack forums for every 10 Mess Hall posts. This worked for a good while, but the magnetic temptation of the Mess Hall came to light again a couple of months.

Fights began to break out in the Mess Hall. People were posting way too much and outside issues were brought to a head. Things were falling apart. The admins soon put their foot down. They gave the whole of GAJ a choice: Stop the fights, or destroy the Mess Hall.

The fights were soon curbed, and to keep things in check, the admins held mod applications. Eventually 2 mods were chosen: Miss Shiina and Ferrari Jones.

Not terribly long after his appointment, Ferrari's fanboy-ism got the better of him and he started a flame war with other users over Halo vs Half-Life. AdmiralFutch got angry, and de-modded Ferrari, who subsequently left GAJ, leaving Miss Shiina as the sole moderator of the Mess Hall. She was then promoted to Admin after Dead Decoy left.