Posting this here in the event that it might ring a few bells.
Around the very late 2000s and some time afterwards, there was one place called the "Let's Play Forum" (Not to be confused with "Let's Play Zone," which has been mentioned several times before in this thread) that was run by goons who got chased out of SA for being too smug and unlikable for their already-dreadful standards.
I'm a former member of Let's Play Forum. I'm happy to recount whatever history the thread here is interested in.
However, honestly, the place was pretty typical for a forum community, and it never had the influence that Something Awful's Let's Play subforum had. The LPF story is more that of a niche group that existed at an interesting point in time, but doesn't have a lot of relevance unless you like obscure Internet history.
First of all, Grawl wasn't chased out of SA or LP. He was
making LPs over the course of the forum's lifespan. He didn't do a huge amount outside of actually hosting the place, so running the forum itself fell to a few others who were active. LPF was not a cult of personality for Grawl.
The forum's culture did try to emulate SA though. While it had a decently active Off Topic section it was still a good place for LPs outside of SA. It aimed to be better than the standard that YouTube was putting out. Still though, many 2008 Retsupurae and ChipCheezum RPs riffed over videos made by members of LPF.
There was sort of an initiation joining LPF, but not really to the point of hazing IMO. Like every forum it had an Introduction board, but in order to post LPs you needed it to pass review from the community. It was mostly a quality and feedback thing but things would get cliquey and trolly sometimes though that usually happened outside the dedicated LP areas.
Most of the community weren't goons, but would eventually become goons. We looked up to SA.
That might seem stupid now to everyone here but SA was still good back at that time, if you can believe it. I mean, Proteus was still posting there even when he stopped making LPs because
the forum got too big.
Sidenote about Something Awful LP, the shitlib stuff started infecting that place in earnest around late 2013 about a year after the Dangan Ronpa Tumblr invasion. Before that our first troonout was DazzlingAddar / Dazzling Anime / Maple McKenzie
between late 2011 and early 2012 who I see got mentioned in the thread earlier for that fetish VTuber avatar.
The only other shitlib echoes really came from Zorak, the mod of ADTRW (anime subforum), who posted in LP occasionally. He exhibited typical SA mod behavior there.
Leper's Colony (
Wayback Machine,
archive.vn),
Original thread (Gas Chambered threads require an SA account to view)
That user later got banned by Lowtax himself for this epic post. I think the ban came months after the actual post when FYAD's Nite Krew replied to Lowtax with it but I cbf finding those posts.
Original thread (
Wayback Machine,
archive.vn),
Leper's Colony (
Wayback Machine,
archive.vn)
It was well known he was friends with Zorak too. And that it was so blatant people still posted about it years later.
Original thread (
Wayback Machine,
archive.vn)
Unrelated, but why was the user defending Zorak in the post above permabanned? They were posting about loli porn games too. Who would've guessed?!
Original thread
Leper's Colony
Returning to LPF, Schildkrote was responsible for trolling the forum soon after it opened. However, LPF didn't just ban him. Instead, after arguing a bit, it was Schildkrote who encouraged LPF to implement quality standards on the forum. That made the content everyone posted much better and those ideas stuck until the end. I don't think Grawl had much opposition to Schildkrote.
Honestly, I can't think of anyone who disowned Grawl. LPF died because the staff, not including Grawl, were resistant to change that the rest of the community wanted. Everyone just left for SA in the end and had a good time there instead.
The forum had more going on but that's just the stuff relevant to what people here brought up. I can talk more about SALP history too if anyone cares.