Input wanted: The History of Sponge and Spongie

Hi all,
i’m currently trying to gather information about the history of Sponge and our mascot Spongie to create a new page on the Docs. I joined the Forums in january and thus don’t know much of the things that happened before that date. That’s where you (people on the forums) come in. I’m seeking help to get everything sorted and finally commited to GitHub!

History of Sponge itself (i’m trying to be unbiased):


(need help here too)

History of Spongie (the mascot):
need further input here

  • Old Spongie mascot was first posted in Sponge on Esper.net and on Reddit
    ( Reddit - Dive into anything )
  • The user strad removed the Bukket, replaced Spigot with Spout and Cauldron with Forge plus added an antenna
  • an anonymous user removed all labels and setup spongie as the default reddit icon
  • (old) Spongie wasn’t vector art, thus Sponge staff decided to create a new mascot
  • the first draft of new Spongie was posted
    ( NEED LINK! )
  • a second friendlier version was created
  • both versions were posted in State of Spongie:

ToDo:
Look up exact dates and content of the SoS1 to 4.
Look up API Version releasedates

Note:
PLEASE keep this thread to facts. i don’t want drama in here, just unbiased information!
Thank you :smile: !

Relevant Issue on the Docs: Add Spongie page · Issue #262 · SpongePowered/SpongeDocs · GitHub

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The announcements category could be of quite some use there.

…people from the Forge modding scene, afaik we have spigot people here aswell.

Also:

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Such posts are exactly what i’m looking for. Thank you!
Just throw links at me, i’m absolutely fine with that :smile:

Will browse the announcements category and read DotDash’s SoakedUp! too.


I’ll add everything to the first post to keep all information in one place.

The first ever mention of naming the project ‘Sponge’

[09:27:20] Firehead94 Sponge

IRC log IRC Channel log for nextstep

Also

First SpongeAPI commit (7th Sept 2014)

First Sponge commit (8th Sept 2014)

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Added the above. Thank you too! :smile:

Should be spelled curse not course.

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Aug 21: EvilSeph announced the halt of development of Bukkit

Annouces on the behalf of bukkit team.

Between Aug22 and Sept12 almost all Bukkit Staff quit, later Curse took over with new staff

Keep in mind that Evilseph did not quit, but was removed by Curse without annoucement.

EDIT:

jeb_ states that Mojang owns Bukkit. Bukkit was bought when the BukkitDevs where accuired by Mojang

Nothing states how Bukkit was bought. It wasnt bought with the bukkit developers. The bukkit.org problems are attributed to Curse.

I don’t think you should mention so much of the Bukkit history as Sponge should be a replacement but has nothing else to do with it. You should better write something about the histories of Spout and Forge: The Forge recode in 1.8, for example. C[A]uldron might be interesting as well, because even though it has a totally different structure, it did the same as Sponge without support for Vanilla clients (a plugin API and support for Forge mods).

I’m not sure wether i should include the Bukkit story or parts of it or not. This is definitely a point that should be discussed in here. I’m currently just collecting and sorting information. I think the decision what should stay and what will be left out should be made at a later state. I appreciate your opinion nontheless :smile:

As said above im collecting this to create a history page on the docs. So the final decision on the content of the final page belongs to the Sponge staff anyways.

I’ll think about Spout and Forge. Forge breaking from 1.7 to 1.8 is definitely a valid point.

1 Like

The Spout and Forge histories will probably be a pretty big undertaking. Both projects histories span atleast over 3+ years.

i don’t want to gather the whole story of Spout and Forge here (we’re still on Sponge forums), but i think the things that lead to the creation of sponge are important… As Spout was shut down and the devs came here to help that should probably get included. And Forge with the Forge API breaking from 1.7.10 to 1.8 and the wish for a non-breaking API across versions too. :smile:

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EvilSeph announced on behalf of bukkit team, yes. will correct that.

I’m not sure when/if and most important what Mojang bought. If you could provide links/sources or even further thoughts on that topic feel free to do so :smile:

Corrected the mentioned faults for now.

The thing is other than the bukkit team hire, there has been no annoucement of what mojang bought. Curse doesnt seem to care either, as they stated that they would let mojang change stuff in MCF, even though mojang owns nothing on said forums.

Wrong. Typical propaganda.

@Necrodoom
Yes you’re absolutely right. removed that point as there are no known facts about it afaik.

@IndustryRevolution

Elaborate please?!

Apparently user created just to reply to me. Heh.

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I agree that the other projects (Bukkit/Craftbukkit, Spout, Forge, Cauldron) are all relevant to the origin of the Sponge Project, we should include only a basic summary of each - what it is, what it’s for, how old, who was involved. It is probably also important to mention what became of them (in the case of Spout, Craftbukkit and Cauldron), but that needs to be as uncontroversial as possible.
The real importance of these other projects to Sponge is in the personnel (and in the case of Forge, and to a lesser extent Spout, the existing codebase). Several former devs from each group are now indispensable to Sponge, in various ways. The community that has developed around the project has also had a role to play in keeping things going, and many of them are from the same places.

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I came up with a first draft on the docs. Read it here:
Further input (here and/or on github) is appreciated!

Here’s actually the full start of the log from the very first line:

[23:29:39] *** Joins: sk89q ([email protected])
[23:29:39] *** anarchy.esper.net sets mode: +nt
[23:29:40] *** sk89q sets mode: +s
[23:30:35] *** Joins: luacs1998 ([email protected])
[23:30:57] * luacs1998 shall take the debate position of the forge supremacist
[23:31:03] *** Joins: TabletCube ([email protected])
[23:31:11] <sk89q> lel
[23:31:11] <sk89q> hi
[23:31:14] *** Joins: Dark_Arc ([email protected])
[23:31:25] <Dark_Arc> oh hai
[23:31:30] *** Joins: blood ([email protected])
[23:31:34] *** Joins: Johnson ([email protected])
[23:31:39] * luacs1998 shall take the debate position of the forge supremacist
[23:31:47] <luacs1998> :P
[23:31:51] <blood> good name sk89q
[23:31:52] <blood> =)
[23:32:07] <luacs1998> heh, that steve jobs cube computer
[23:32:12] <sk89q> haha
[23:32:15] <sk89q> I should probably op some people
[23:32:17] <sk89q> I am pretty bad at that
[23:32:24] <sk89q> #sk89q has like the same 6 ops for 3 years
[23:32:44] *** Joins: cindylo|laptop ([email protected])
[23:33:11] *** Joins: Dpa1991 ([email protected])
[23:33:13] <luacs1998> lol
[23:33:19] <Dark_Arc> what's that have to do w/ anything?
[23:33:19] <Dark_Arc> lol
[23:33:47] <sk89q> appears blood is not registered
[23:34:07] <luacs1998> sk, have you /cs register 'ed this channel?
[23:34:09] <sk89q> yes
[23:35:29] *** Joins: AbrarSyed ([email protected])

Frankly, Sponge wasn’t really started in an organized matter at all. I created #nextstep and then advertised it in #sk89q and #cauldron.

People came in… a lot of people. Something like 700-900 people in the channel.

Then I made this document. This document was the most important document of #nextstep. I actually gave pretty much everyone that asked access to edit it.

Everything was essentially via consensus as I asked questions, took opinions, and then put them on the document. Eventually there was a lot of support for a new project, and then people asked me to be leader of this new project. I personally asked blood to help as co-leader, and both of us created the IRC channels and registered the appropriate social media accounts after people seemed to like the name ‘Sponge’.

At this point, I invited all the devs of the major projects (I’m talking like literally everyone – people from Canary, Spigot, Sponge, Bukkit, Forge, Essentials, etc.) into a private developer channel. At this point, no one had officially signed up to work on Sponge… within the next few weeks, people left and stayed, and we ended up with people from Forge, Spout, Bukkit, Essentials, and some other projects staying on.

tl;dr Sponge was created by a mob and put blood and I as leader. A few people from some of the major projects became committed to the project through the course of the next few weeks after I personally invited them all into Sponge’s private developer channel.

I also still have all the IRC logs from the time, including from all private channels, if you have a question.

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I’d like to thank everybody who participated in here, on irc and on github.
I created a PR which was merged today.

Read the result here:
https://docs.spongepowered.org/en/about/history.html