SmashBoards

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Homepage

Current logo of SmashBoards.

SmashBoards, also formerly known as Smash World Forums or SWF, is a video-game forum, generally used to discuss strategies, as well as find and host tournaments, for the Super Smash Bros. series. In addition to helping players organize tournaments for the games, SmashBoards is notably where the most widely-accepted tier lists are published.

First opened in 2000, the website has over 240,000 members, making it the most popular Super Smash Bros. forum on the internet. Despite its age, SmashBoards remains active, and alongside Facebook, it remains one of the most active hubs of activity for Smash.

History

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Prior to the formation of SmashBoards, Gideon, a twelve year old smasher, created Smash World, a website devoted to Smash 64. One year later, he founded SmashBoards.com as a companion site. Initially referred to as the "Smash World Forums", Gideon founded the site as to help players of Smash 64 talk to one another, as well as allow smashers to discuss the then-upcoming Melee.

In addition to its standard boards, a Back Room was also created for certain users who had proved themselves; this Back Room would later go on to form the Back Rooms of later games, which would decide the tournament rulesets of games, as well as the tier lists for the games.

After the release of Melee, the first tournaments began to get organized on the SWForums, owing to its large playerbase and ability for any player to potentially view topics about tournaments. Initially starting off as small, local affairs, Matt Deezie is generally credited with starting the national scene by using the forum to communicate with players outside of his native California, inviting users from as far away as Illinois to attend his tournaments. The site also allowed users to communicate with overseas players, creating an international scene for the game as players in North America, Europe, and Japan began to invite each other to their respective countries for Melee tournaments.

With the continued expansion of Melee's tournament scene, the game was eventually picked up by Major League Gaming in 2004, who helped promote the site, firmly cementing SmashBoards as the world's largest forum and community devoted to Smash. The MLG kept Melee in its circuits for many years, only dropping the game in 2007 due to declining interest in the Nintendo GameCube and the development of Brawl underway. In September 2008, with Brawl having been released worldwide and beginning to be analyzed as a tournament game, the MLG purchased the forums from Gideon in September 2008 for an undisclosed sum, giving the site stabler servers. A large number of posts from before 2008, however, were also lost in the transfer, and as a result, information about tournament results and similar topics have been lost.

In 2011, the forum was officially renamed SmashBoards, after its domain name, though the term "SWF" is still a common shorthand for the board. On November 27, 2012, Major League Gaming officially ended its involvement with Smash by selling the website to AlphaZealot's company Xyelot LLC.^[1]

With the upcoming release of Smash 4 in 2014, SmashBoards expanded to act as a news network for Smash in general, covering the release of Smash 4, tournaments for the various games, and promoting videos of players on YouTube.

A sister site to SmashBoards, Squidboards, was launched in 2015, serving as a SmashBoards-style forum for the Splatoon community.

Forums

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The editor who added this tag elaborates: Requires information on Back Rooms

As of 2017, the following boards are available on SmashBoards. All of them can be immediately posted in, with exception of the Back Rooms.

News
Welcome Center / Meet & Greet
Smash Connect

Smash on Nintendo Switch Speculation
- General Speculation

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U / Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS
- General Discussion
- Competitive Discussion
- Character Discussion
- Online Discussion
- Videos, Livestreams, and Other Media

Super Smash Bros. Melee
- Melee Discussion
- Melee Character Discussion
- Melee Videos, Livestreams, and Other Media

Project M
- General Discussion
- Character Discussion
- Help and Support
- Customized Content
- Videos, Livestreams, and Other Media

Super Smash Bros. 64
- Smash 64 Discussion
- Character Discussion
- Videos
- Online Events

Super Smash Bros. Brawl
- Brawl General Discussion
- Brawl Competitive Discussion
- Brawl Character Discussion
- Brawl Videos, Livestreams, and Other Media

Smash Tournaments
- Tournament Discussions
- Tournament Listings
- Regional Zones
- Online Tournament Listings
- Ranking & Results

Pokkén Tournament
- Pokkén Tournament General Discussion
- Pokkén Tournament Character Discussion

Smash Workshop
- Developer Studio
- Melee Workshop
- Brawl Workshop

Smasher's Hangout
- Light House
- Pool Room
- NintenZone
- Decisive Games
- Arts and Entertainment
- Debate Hall

Archives
- Public Archive

April Fools' Day gags

In 2015, SmashBoards became ShaqBoards, which made everyone's profile picture into images of Shaquille O'Neal while character mains became emoticons of Shaq. Tier Lists for the game Shaq Fu were posted as well as a guaranteed Luigi misfire tech being discovered. ^[2]

In 2016, SmashBoards would become EmblemBoards as an inside joke to the huge amount of Fire Emblem characters present in the Super Smash Bros. series. It made everyone's picture into images of characters from the Fire Emblem franchise as well as turning character mains into emoticons of characters from said franchise. Users notably tiered waifus and husbandos during this day. ^[3]

In 2017, SmashBoards became KnucklesBoards as an inside joke to Knuckles the Echidna, who was intended for inclusion in Project M before development of the mod ceased in 2015. Each user had their picture changed into artwork of Knuckles from various Sonic the Hedgehog games, while character mains became an emoticon of Knuckles. Tier lists were notably based on Knuckles' appearances in Sonic the Fighters and Sonic Battle.^[4]

Trivia

Players first discovered and discussed wavedashing on Smashboards. Its use as a technique was widely attributed to a SmashBoards user named Toadbanjoconker, who posted a video of him performing it back in April 3, 2002.
During December 2005, Grimer icons started to appear on people's avatars and signatures.
To turn his website into a business, the owner of the forums, Gideon, started to sell "Premium Memberships", in which members would pay to get special avatars and custom titles. The highest price (Diamond Membership) even got members into the Back Room at one time.