The Crusades of Evil

The Crusades of Evil, as they are nicknamed, were times of extreme peril in the Sporum. These times mostly included the massive spam wars of 2014, and the ongoing derailing of the Sporum in 2015. Both of these events were manipulated and controlled by various people and groups, including the infamous AntiSporum and the ECF.

## The Beginning

It began late 2013 with DarkLord's return to the Sporum. He had previously been an active roleplayer and contributor to the forum, but had vanished for about a year. He came back and was changed drastically. At the time there were no admins or SporeMasters to stop him from spamming; and so, he had spread a cornucopia of spam across the Sporum. During a brief visit, however, SporeMasterSlime took notice and banned him. DarkLord resisted for a few weeks, popping in and out; ultimately, he then vanished again. Come March of 2014, DarkLord had returned again. This time many Sporumers expressed their hatred of him and ridiculed him. Sharples at the time, in a quest for redemption from the community for past problems, threatened to call Maxis employees to permaban DarkLord. It was then that DarkLord admitted defeat and disappeared. But this did not last long. DarkLord still lurked the Sporum frequently.

It came to pass that Sharples was banned for getting too far out of line by SporeMasterSlime. In this unfair perma, Slime began locking every thread which was associated with Sharples, including the completely legitimate "Adventure Play 0 Bug" thread which aimed at getting a fix for the glitch that caused players to not have a recorded number of plays to their adventures. This enraged Sharples and he then sought out DarkLord and asked for his help. DarkLord agreed, still thirsty for revenge. The two organized thousands of spam attacks in 2014 alongside many other users based in a forum called the AntiSporum; these attacks are described as [The Six Month Spam War of 2014]. They finally ended in December with one great explosion of spam -- it was the largest recorded attack in Sporum history, coined "Doomsday" by the trolls themselves. They would pop up once a week after their bans had expired and destroy the Sporum. Then during their bans, DarkLord would release cryptic YouTube videos that contained threats as well as thousands of strange secret codes. A user named TyrantWizard was able to crack some of these in a counter video; they were also known to post counter-threats to DarkLord on the Sporum Wiki.

## The Spammers' Siege

DarkLord and Sharples were, from January 3rd, 2015 and onward, forgiven for their attacks since they apologized and were allowed to reenter the Sporum due to the merciful nature of SporeMasterDOGC\_Kyle. SporeMasterSlime, on the other hand, was less willing to accept their presence in the Sporum and Sharples reported getting smarmy PMs from the SporeMaster which held such comments as telling Sharples to leave because nobody wanted him. This enraged DarkLord, who then set himself on a mission to avenge all the trolls who had fallen to Slime.

DarkLord then began lightly trolling around on the Sporum by way of shitposting in order to derail intelligent discussion. He did this by passing spam posts under the SM radar and making them look legitimate, when in reality it was just shitposts in disguise. It began to desensitize the Sporum's users to spam when the posts came in large numbers. Eventually they began to get more and more ridiculous, and by May 2015, the Sporum was totally destroyed with spam. Even after the brief return of MaxisBazajaytee, DarkLord's system of terror still seemed to prevail. Idiocy was everywhere, threads were disappearing at ever-increasing rates, and the SporeMasters seemed powerless compared to the threat DarkLord and Sharples posed.

This evil plot was revealed later by none other than DarkLord himself when he suffered a major defeat in his trolling career. A bunch of people he had hated began to return to the RP section to bring more roleplays. DarkLord posted messages in their threads warning all Sporumers about them, and he initiated a flame war, then was banned. In the time that he was banned, one of his own forums called Storyweb, was attacked by some of his old enemies. DarkLord commanded all of his allies to strike against them; amongst these people were Sharples, Spode-an, 5poreMasterPwn, even OakProductions. However, a vital piece of the story was about to be unearthed.

## The Fall of DarkLord

Following MaxisBazajaytee's inheritance of the Sporum from MaxisKane, Spode-an went to DarkLord and attempted to coerce him and Sharples into spamming the Sporum again; however, he was denied as DarkLord and Sharples had turned away from such a thing. However, Spode-an also went to MaxisBazajaytee and reported that DarkLord and Sharples were planning to attack again -- it was all a ploy to start some lulz. When this was revealed to him, DarkLord banned Spode-an from his forum, the "AntiSporum".

However, DarkLord wanted to get even -- no, DarkLord wanted to win. DarkLord hated losing. While Spode-an was banned from the AntiSporum, DarkLord changed his password information so that he could get into his account and delete all the messages they had been exchanging to destroy all the evidence. Then, using his own account, DarkLord sent a very threatening message to Spode-an which was encrypted with a Caesar cipher, so that if Spode-an screenshotted it, nobody would understand it. However, Spode-an had taken an interest in deciphering and was even previously learning lessons from DarkLord; and so, he decoded the messages.

The message stated Spode-an's IP address; that DarkLord had tracked down where he lived; and that he was was going to release this information to the public if Spode-an didn't give him his Sporum email and password. DarkLord went as far as to say he would venture onto the Deep Web and find people willing to track Spode-an down and murder him. Spode-an, seeing through this ploy by DarkLord, revealed that he also used the Deep Web and was just as dangerous. The two eventually came to the compromise that Spode-an would simply leave the Sporum.

Later, Spode-an attempted to reach TyrantWizard by posting on the Sporum Wiki. They began colluding against DarkLord on a forum, where TyrantWizard explained that they knew DarkLord in real life as well as revealing that she was his ex-girlfriend alongside some personal information about DarkLord himself. Spode-an, wishing to cause maximum lulz while restoring DarkLord's trust, betrayed TyrantWizard and took all of this information directly to him. Following this, the two were on good terms for a time.

Following the events of Spode-an, DarkLord found his enemies to be in the RP section once more. He apparently had a long history with some of them both on the Sporum and on Roleplex, an alternative RP forum he had made. These enemies were StinkyPachem, Lonestar45, and MaxxToron. Roleplex sucked away a huge crowd of RPers from the Sporum and most other RP sites that have been connected to the Sporum; however, the site was shut down due to instability in the userbase. DarkLord then went on to create Storyweb, a replacement for Roleplex. He only invited people he liked over to Storyweb and personally banned every person he thought was responsible for Roleplex's destruction. This caused outrage. Lonestar and Maxx had both made appearances on Storyweb and posted flame-bait-ish messages as to provoke DarkLord; he retaliated by ruining their threads.

When DarkLord called out his forces to help him attack, Spode-an saw an opportunity to create chaos once more and betrayed him once more by sending all of the secret information from his earlier endeavors to StinkyPachem, Lonestar, and Maxx. Immediately following this, Maxx attacked Storyweb with spam and StinkyPachem arrived under the username "Dippin sauce" and began sending all of this information to DarkLord's close friends who knew nothing about any of it, even the Sporum events.

DarkLord's friends promptly turned on him and he was ruined. He posted a lengthy journal on his DeviantArt which apologized for everything he had done, as well as revealing a large amount of plans and things he'd already done. He had planned on getting Slime removed as a SporeMaster and getting himself elected as one, as well as him being TyrantWizard and having just been playing a game with the Sporum all along. In fact, there were secrets he had even left unsaid to Sharples; his best friend during his spamming career. The journal entry can be found here: http://kyrienna.deviantart.com/journal/Something-I-need-to-say-530049750 *Note: As of 12/1/17 the journal leads to a 404 error. A copy-pasted and slightly annotated version remains in the following section.*

**DarkLord stated:**

*" Some people ask me why. Well, I can never properly say this. I can never explain it in words you'll understand. The best analogy I can come up with is a drug addiction. Trolling does give me a rush of sorts. But, in hindsight, I am a very bored person. I spend a lot of time on the internet and for a while I spent it pulling little pranks on people, laughing with myself. It was fun for a while. Then I got bored with that too. I kept taking things up to the next level, taking risks, and generally making my reputation grow worse and worse. I grew numb to that and really didn't care what people thought about me. Mainly because I was confident my best friends would say, "oh it's just Darkel. Darkel is Darkel. He's crazy, just let him have his fun." And for a long time it was like that, until just recently. "*

*" It wasn't that I liked to mess with people or make them feel bad. It was more that I was incredibly interested in the Sporum and it's past. It had lore and a fiction built up around it. I wanted to be involved in that. I wanted to build a character in the Sporum that was the greatest villain that had ever struck it. But that came at the expense of actually doing things that people disliked in order to grow an infamous background. And I won't lie, it was a bit uncomfortable at first. But numbness grew on as time continued and eventually it was second nature to me. Even after I was recognized as basically the present-day big troll of the Sporum, it was still not enough. I wanted to make this character into someone that wasn't just a villain people hated, but also destroyed the Sporum in its entirety. I wanted people to talk about me with fear and have the idea that "that dude destroyed the Sporum. He's capable of x and y." "*

DarkLord goes on to detail a plot which he had called "the Master Plan" which talks about his enormous plan to wreck so much havoc on chaos onto the Sporum that such levels of evil have never before been seen on the site. DarkLord completed his goal in becoming the biggest troll of the Sporum in many ways, and his apology, painfully, may have made him twice as famous than he was beforehand.

*" And over time I formulated something I nicknamed "the Master Plan." I had goals to get SporeMasterSlime removed from moderation when MaxisBazajaytee returned. Possibly lie and trick them into modding me if that became a possibility. That way I could form the "New Sporum Order" which was described as the goal of the ECF (another group I'm a part of) through the Sporum. During this process I actually did a few people some good, and got the attention drawn to their unfair bans there and helped contribute to their release. But that really doesn't matter anymore. If that part of the plan failed, I planned to slowly desensitize the Sporum to spam. I would do this by vaguely trolling and spamming here and there. Not enough to get me banned but enough to wiggle the Sporumers into a conversation where they produced similar posts. It actually began to work and now the Sporum is just like /b/ on 4chan. "*

## The Aftermath

DarkLord was gone; he had just vanished. Nobody knew where he went and yet everyone was looking for him. Everyone wanted to speak to him about this. DarkLord then announced he was retiring and would post on the Sporum far more sparingly. Some parts of the Sporum cried out at this; indeed, even DarkLord had his own fanbase. However, he reappeared during the early days of June, 2015. He simply lulled about, arguing with Spode-an, and posting just to keep people happy; as inevitably getting more bans for ticking off SporeMasterSlime (this resulted in the Unban Darkel Campaign, which ultimately resulted in the massive Unban Spode-an protests, possibly the most unstable moment of the Sporum since the Crusades of Evil).

While the Crusades of Evil have ended long ago, the Sporum still has a story left in it, even with so much silence and inactivity. In fact, the story may have only just begun.