Warriors Official Forum

The Warriors Official Forum is, well, the official HarperCollins forum for the Warrior Cats series by Erin Hunter. According to a poll, its membership demographic is mostly age 13 and under, compared to other sites where it's mostly 13 and over. As such, the grammar and spelling on the forum is, well, not quite up to par.

See here for a roleplay some members did that is totally not a ripoff of the games on Warrior's Wish.

Tropes used in Warriors Official Forum include:

• Accentuate the Negative: Frequently seen, particularly with the Fanatic Challenge.
• Ambiguous Gender: Gender is not displayed on the public profile, therefore, this applies to everyone that does not have a gender-specific username. This provides much amusement for some people.
• Ban on Politics: And other sensitive topics such as religion - but these rules only came after too many flame wars began.
  • Not that this stops anyone. Topics that break these rules are fairly common; many of the more lenient moderators tend to avert their eyes until the topics are reported by users.
• Big No / Big Yes: Page stretching "YAAAAAAAAY"s, "NOOOOOOO"s, and !!!!!s are common.
• Blatant Lies: Many of the threads where people claim to have cancer/be dying/something horrible happened to them. Naturally, several members believe them anyway and proceed to bash those that don't.
• BUMP: Used to the point of abuse.
• Children Are Innocent: In the eyes of the rulemakers.
  • All links are banned (apart from HarperCollins-owned sites), because anything not created by them could have inappropriate content. They don't even let you say ".com" on the end of a site name. And words such as "youtube" and "proboards" are censored in order to further discourage linking.
  • The censor. Censored-out words include "suck", "fatty", or even words like "headlights" and "lotion", of all things.
    • Amusingly, upon last check, the words "badass", "bastard" and "douche" aren't censored. Huh.
  • Subverted by the members themselves. They actually had to create rules saying that there is to be no "forcemating" (rape) in RPs, and that all romance RPs must be PG-rated. Yes, these rules were necessary on a forum consisting of mostly under-13 members.
  • Any references to homosexuality end with the topic they were in getting deleted. This, despite the fact that there are actually gay members.
• Complaining About Complaining
• Cross Player: Done sometimes in role-plays. A shock to those who assume that someone playing their mate in an RP is also their "forum mate" (the OF's apparent version of dating) when they learn that their "mate" is actually played by a person of the same gender.
• Development Hell: Apparently where the online Warriors game is. Of course, due to the fact that fans have been waiting for it since about two years ago when it was announced, everyone's building it up to be a bigger thing than it probably will be.
• Digital Avatar: Avatars must be chosen from a preset gallery; you cannot use your own. The only "different" avatars are those from the winners of the Fanatic Challenge (they are the regular ones with a star or paw in the corner).
• Does Not Understand Sarcasm: In one of the tour diaries, Vicky told a story about an argument she'd once had with a fan, later learning that he was right, that cats typically don't live in large groups. She finished her story with "Watch for Series Five: In Which The Clans Realize They Actually Don't Like Living Together And Split Up." This was met with an outcry of protest from fans who thought she was being serious.
• Double Entendre: Half of the words censored by the forum. Ignoring the fact that the majority of the people within the site's age group would not even know that the words have a naughty meaning if they hadn't been censored.
• Drama: Triumphant example.
• Emo Teen: Several. There have been topics on this.
• Emoticon: Little kitty-shaped ones.
• Fan Nickname: The members refer to the site as WCF (for Warrior Cats Forums, presumably), while elsewhere, the site is called the OF or WOF (thus, members are "Wofers").
• Flame War: Nothing out of the ordinary.
• Forum Pecking Order
  • The Gods Themselves - The Erins (the ErinHunter account).
  • The Administration - JanaM (formerly).
  • Moderators - Many over time. Most of them have come and gone, but here's all the ones that they've had in the forum's history: Warriorcats Moderator (aka Dave), Joe S, lisab, Carolyn, Tina, Elizabeth, Ohnsoon , Lori, Mike, Mary Kate, Will, Matthew, Mary, TJ, Alana, Alex.
  • Guest Posters - Nonexistent. You must have an account (with parental permission if under 13) to post.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: Frequently attempted, and any successful posts are quickly deleted by the mods.
• Hide Your Gays and Hide Your Lesbians: A common source of outrage by the users, many of whom are gay and lesbian themselves.
• Hit-and-Run Poster: Kit stealers (at least the original few), kit huggers, kit haunters - these all typically are nothing but someone coming into an RP and posting "so-and-so hugs/haunts/etc Examplekit" once.
• Internet Tough Guy: Crop up on rare occasions, and usually get suspended/banned for their threats.
• Letters 2 Numbers: Some people type like this.
• Lucky Charms Title/Heavy Metal Umlaut: Seeing as there's over 65,000 members, and pretty much all of the names new members want are taken, there are many, many usernames like this. This also appears frequently in "headers" (text people copy-and-paste into the start and end of the actual post because apparently signatures aren't enough).
• Me Too: A good portion of each thread.
• Mistakenly Banned: Claimed once in a while, though most of the time it's a person who knows why they were banned, pretending to be a friend/relative of the banned account. One amusing real case of someone being mistakenly banned was when they were inactive for a month, and upon trying to log in again, they got the following message: "Account Suspended: Your account has been suspended for the following reason: Hello! This account is being suspended because the owner is reported as deceased."
• Moral Guardians: Due to their... curious choice of words that need to be censored, and overall strictness, the mods sometimes come off as this.
• Ninja Editing: Done occasionally. Infamously used in the first Fanatic Challenge, when people would make a First Post to guarantee their spot (the point of the Challenge was to be one of the first ten with the correct answer), and then after seeing others post the answer, they would go back and edit their first post, making it appear as though they had the correct answer all along. Resulted in ALL posts, not just ones made after the first minute, having a "Last Edited by xxxx at xx:00" message.
• Noodle Incident:
  • People's reactions to Joe S saying "Stop fighting or heads will roll" would qualify.
  • The time that the official Erin Hunter account got hacked and started posting crazy "spoilers" for The Fourth Apprentice - for example, that Firestar gets killed by beavers. Many didn't question this information because it was, after all, the real account.
• Number of the Beast: In addition to many other odd things they censor, apparently they decided that the number 666 is inappropriate for the site, because they actually censored the number. It appears as *** instead.
• Online Personas: The most commonly ones seen are:
  • Spammer - And how.
  • Thread Necromancer - Surprisingly common, these particular ones go to the last page in each board and just post "I agree" or "lol".
  • Troll - How many are trolls, and how many are serious, we'll never know...
• Only Sane Man: Many of the older members see themselves as this.
• Play-By-Post Games: Warriors-related ones are known as "FanClans" here.
• Post Count: Many dream of achieving the Super Message Board User rank at 100,000 posts. That's right, one hundred thousand. Results in much spamming.
  • Quite a few already have.
• Running Gag: Warriorcats Moderator's love of brownies. And the joke about the site being powered by hamsters running on wheels - they even made an avatar of it.
• Serious Business: People are posting that they stole imaginary roleplay kits? The horror!
• Symbol Swearing: The censor replaces swear words with asterisks. Seeing as they censor words that aren't so bad, as listed above, this can sometimes make sentences appear to have a worse meaning than they actually do. (Example: someone's talking about the character Swallowtail and says "Swallowtail is a fatty". This becomes "Swallowtail is a * * * * *" and we'd naturally assume they said a different five-letter-word.)
• There Are No Girls on the Internet: Averted - there are many more girls than guys.
• Xtreme Kool Letterz: Since there are many preteens who don't particularly care about spelling/grammar, this comes up pretty often.