Since its inception on July 4, 2003, Legion World has been home to some 1500 posters. Well, maybe not 1500, as a good number of those “members” are alt IDs. In any case, many posters have hung around for the long haul while others have visited for only a short time before disappearing back into cyberspace.
Less than a month after Legion World debuted, the poster known as Portfolio Boy created a novel way of celebrating this Internet community: He adapted the sales and popularity rankings commonly used in music charts to create a HOT 100 chart of LW posters listed by post counts. His chart, soon paired down to the customary Top 40, ran every week or so from 8/3/03 and 9/13/03, and then resumed on a mostly bi-weekly basis from 11/12/03 until 2/21/04. PB finished his work with two later charts, on 5/14/04 and 7/23/04.
LW never lets a good idea (or even a bad one) die, however, so the poster currently known as Mystic Luna carried the torch for two updates. The first, on 11/14/04, continued PB’s original thread. The second, on 8/14/05, listed the Top 75 rankings of that time.
Then followed a four-year hiatus of no charts at all. This is truly a shame as significant chart activity would have occurred during that period. Many long-time posters slowed down their activity or disappeared altogether, while new friends arrived and injected energy into the boards. LW co-founder Lightning Lad, who had dominated the Number One spot since the beginning, finally gave way, first to Cobalt Kid and then to Quislet, Esq., who has dominated the top spot ever since. (A fourth poster, MLLASH, had earlier reached Number One.)
Being the Top 40 junkie that I am, I monitored my own progress as I slid from a peak of Number 14 in the early days to Number 31 when I wasn’t posting so much. After a gradual renewal of posting, I found myself catapulted back into the Top 20 and currently into the Top 10. Casey Kasem, original DJ of the old American Top Forty radio program, would have been proud!
Noting that several other posters monitored their own chart progress and engaged in friendly competition over chart positions, I decided to post my own Top 40 updates. My first chart, continuing an earlier thread started by Portfolio Boy (but not his last chart, as I later learned), appeared on 9/12/09. Since then, I’ve updated the Top 40 at the beginning of each month.
Then, to show how much of a junkie I really am, I tracked down all of the previous charts and combined them to create the index you are now eyeballing. The Legion World Top 40 Index lists every poster who has made the chart as well as every positon he or she has occupied through 5/1/10. It thus provides a permanent record of the 71 posters who have graced the Top 40 in its seven-year existence.
Many prominent posters, of course, have never made the chart at all, while others have charted only briefly; many Legion Worlders don't care whether they make such a list or not. That’s all fine; like the various role-playing games, inane word threads, and cover face-offs, the Top 40 is merely part of the multifaceted fun of Legion World. No one is required to participate, and no one is encouraged to post simply for the sake of increasing his or her post count (though that caveat hasn’t stopped some of us from doing it anyway. ) But for those of us who are addicted to chart trivia as well as those with a casual interest, herewith are the results.
Explanation of Format
Posters are listed alphabetically by the first word in their user names (thus, Danny Blaine is listed under D instead of B), excluding articles (the boy with UltraPowers is also listed under B). For clarity, each poster is also listed under the name used when he or she first appeared in the Top 40 (thus, Officer Taylor is listed under LARDLAD). Subsequent names are listed separately but cross-referenced to the first name.
The date each poster first appeared in the Top 40 is given, following by a sequential list of every position the poster occupied on the available charts. Each poster’s highest postion is indicated in bold. An “X” means that the poster fell out of the Top 40 after the previous listed position. Multiple dates mean, of course, that the poster has had separate chart runs.
The ellipses in brackets ( [ . . . ] ) represent that gap between Portfolio Boy’s last chart (7/23/04) and Mystic Luna’s first chart (11/14/04). The numbers in wavy brackets ({ }) represent the gap between Luna’s second chart (8/14/05) and my first chart (9/12/09). Thanks to information provided by Nightcrawler, I was able to reconstruct three charts from that gap (10/14/07, 12/21/08, and 3/14/09). That leaves only the year 2006 unrepresented by any chart data.
[ May 16, 2010, 07:44 PM: Message edited by: He Who Wanders ]
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
Yellow Kid (became Yk, 9/12/09) 8/14/05: 37, X {12/21/08: 40, 37} 35, 35, 36, 37, 37, 38, 38, 39, X
Posted by Cobalt Kid on :
What an awesome undertaking HWW! Statistics junkies like myself will have fun being able to re-check this every so often and analyze the numbers.
What's amazing is how many years Legion World has been in existence by now that lets have have such a broad view of its history through this data.
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
Thanks, Cobie. I look forward to any analysis of these figures.
Posted by SharkLad on :
So, I've been traded to the X-Men?
I gotta reread the key ...
Posted by Outdoor Miner on :
quote:Originally posted by SharkLad: So, I've been traded to the X-Men?
Worse, you were knocked off in the last big crossover.
We're working on a deal, though, so keep cool.
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
quote:Originally posted by SharkLad: So, I've been traded to the X-Men?
I gotta reread the key ...
We're outsourcing a lot of people to the X-Men.
'Cause they could use the members.
Posted by MLLASH on :
Dang... I REALLY need to get a life...
Or, more practically, I need to accept that LEGION WORLD is my life... Posted by Cobalt Kid on :
It's funny how Pov seems like he's always changing his name from these numbers but that's not really the case. That only occassionally happens and lasts for like a week at the most. The numbers just fall on dates when Pov went by another name.
"Pov of Nine" - a reference to the Dallas meet-up which kind of kicked off the huge array of LW meet-ups at Cons!
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
Yes, name changes are fun. It's interesting that some posters have changed their names only briefly while others have changed theirs permanently.
I was unaware, for example, that Kent Shakespeare had once called himself simply Kent--a practice to which he has now returned.
Posted by Invisible Brainiac on :
Wow... just WOW. Thanks for all the hard work, HWL. Think of all the time you must have put into this!
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
) But for those of us who are addicted to chart trivia as well as those with a casual interest, herewith are the results.![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)