It’s Original Post. Like, the first post in the thread.
I’m sorry, that may need some explication as well. 
The OP is the first post in a thread, or the author of that post.
Winter of Our Missed Content: A period of a few months when something really bad happened here, and the SDMB shut down. There was a temporary board where a lot of us migrated to that served as the Dope for the time being. It was quite interesting, with many new features. One of those being (that you might hear about):
Smashie: The new board had animated icons. Nice for a board that likes those things, but we generally don’t do that at the SDMB. The temporary board was just temporary and didn’t really look like ours so it had things that we normally wouldn’t have. Like animated icons. Anyways, there was this one really popular icon that was a happy face wielding a large hammer and smashing whatever was beside him. He was placed beside things so as he’d be hitting them, as was the style of the time. There were requests to bring him back here (he was named by then), but the Powers that be decided that animation wasn’t what this board was about.
I have also seen this period referred to as the diaspora. The SDMB went “off the air” for awhile in early 2002, and reappeared in March. However, all of the posts from mid-December 2001 until it died were lost forever, as the sysadmins weren’t keeping regular backups.
I originally joined in late December 2001 (sometime shortly after the last backup), and had my first 100 or so posts lost to this period. In fact, my “Join Date” above reflects when the board came back online - not my actual date (or post count).
Not to be a jerk, but I somehow doubt “Mod Hat” started on the SDMB.
I think it’s too common a phrase for one board to claim ownership IMHO.
I think it comes in handy for that too.
I doubt that too. The internets have been around a bit longer than six years or so, and to some extent the “Mod Hat” seems like a pretty logical invention that would have been exploited early on.
Gaudere’s Law, named after the…Admin or Mod? I forget…states that any post criticizing a previous post’s grammar or spelling will have a grammatical or spelling error.
Both. She’s been one of the Great Debates mods for years, and has also been an Administrator since the recovery from the Winter of our Missed Content. Her Law caught on long before that time, though, when she was “only” a moderator.
Are any of the variants on the Moderator Hat still around? There used to be a whole Mod Wardrobe used by various moderators. I had a Moderator Watch, and I seem to recall Coldfire donning a pair of Moderator Clogs from time to time.
I did quite a long post earlier today on IANAL, IANAMod, etc., but the hamsters decided they didn’t like it. (Which is another convention – the SDMB server, you see, is apocryphally powered by a wheel powered by little hamsters, who can get tired – causing board slowdowns – or persnickety about posts, causing you to get a “Site Not Found” screen.)
However, one observation I’ve made is that “Mod Hat,” which was originally coined by longtime GD moderator David B (who just this month stepped down after nearly six years of service in that position), has spread across message board-dom, and people who have never heard of him or the SDMB don Mod Hats to make official statements or rulings about violations of board rules. (David originally was an active debater as well as moderator, and invented the Mod Hat to distinguish his two capacities as opinion-bearing poster and as impartial moderator.)
BTW, Chronos, if “Time travels…with divers persons,” may we presume that they are wearing underwater watches? 
Here is my brief career as Gaudere’s PR flack.
Somewhat obscure, but it’s cropped up again on some recent posts: TWIN BODY-POWERED DORRANCE #5X STAINLESS STEEL HOOKS!!! This is a model of prosthetic arm. The phrase originated from the website of a young woman who dreamt of the day she could be fitted with artificial limbs. Not that she required them - her own arms and hands were quite healthy and functional, but she wanted to replace them with the aforementioned prostheses. The website would be updated occasionally with plans for staging elaborate accidents where her arms would be amputated and she would finally get TWIN BODY-POWERED DORRANCE #5X STAINLESS STEEL HOOKS!!!
The phrase should always be written in all-caps and should have three exclamation marks at the end, since that’s the way it always appeared on her website. It entered the SDMB lexicon in a thread discussing the woman’s website. There was some suspicion that it was a fake, but the website eventually disappeared without that being resolved.
Poly, uh…lookit post #2. 
Another board convention is Polycarp’s awful wordplay.
I kid, I kid.
Ah, and you reminded me of another powerful board exclamation. Due to the vulgar nature of the phrase, however, I’ll replace the potentially offensive terms with more benign words:
Woohoo! I am crop-dusting like a GRAVY TRAIN!!!
And here is the thread that started it.
I’d love to see somebody (or perhaps a group of people) put together an “Unofficial Comprehensive Guide to the Straight Dope Message Boards” that includes all the boardspeak (both specific to this board and to Internet message boards in general), board history, must-read threads, rules and guidelines, and basically everything that anyone would need to avoid getting whooshed.
Hey, speaking of getting whooshed, that’s another one we should cover here.
Maybe an outline would look something like this:
Chapter One - Who the hell is Cecil Adams?
Chapter Two - Board history, from Genesis to Winter of Our Missed Content to Present Day.
Chapter Three - SDMB Board Lingo, Hi Opal! to Gaudere’s Law and Everything in Between
Chapter Four - Must-read threads. First entry - “Wally Tries Cybersex”
Chapter Five - Meet your mods and admins, past and present.
Chapter Six - Those Who Must Not Be Named: Our favorite banned posters and the meltdowns that got them banned.
Chapter Seven - The unofficial, alternative communities: Places where Dopers hang out off the main boards.
Chapter Eight - How to post. A comprehensive guide.
Chapter Nine - So You Think You’re Ready for a DopeFest? (Reiterate disclaimers.)
Chapter Ten - Recommended external reading
Optional chapters:
- When It’s No Longer a Leisure Activity: How to treat your addiction to the SDMB
- Yes, Swimming Riddles is very cute IRL
- Our favorite “Ask the XXXX…” threads
- How to Fight Ignorance without coming off as an intellectual snob
- Why you can’t use “Cite?” in casual off-board conversation without everyone scratching their heads and going “Huh?”
Yet another board convention is my slow descent into senility! :o
Actually, I’d forgotten having discussed Mod Hats in my first post (#2) and thought I’d done it, along with IANAL, etc., in “a long post which the hamsters ate” as referenced in my other post.
Color me mortified. :o
Additional entries in Chapter Four -
Cervaise’ The Telemarketer Speaks - I Respond - the greatest flame in SDMB history
Scylla - The Horror of Blimps - no comment could do it justice
Regards,
Shodan
There are five general interest message boards, commonly seen as unofficial spinoffs of the SDMB, that were created and managed by other Dopers; Fabulous Forums of Fathom, Unaboard, G’Dope, NADS and the newest, Skip’s Magic Board. These sites are closely connected to the SDMB community, but not under the purview of the Chicago Reader. FFF and Unaboard, the largest of the unofficial spinoff boards, often serve the role of a refuge when the SDMB is down for a prolonged time.
There are also Doper-run boards that are more niche-oriented, and usually not lumped in with the spinoffs. The ones I know of are Bad Astronomy Bulletin Board (astronomy and astrophysics myths and facts), Cyburbia Forums (urban and town planning), NoClueBoy’s Star Trek Discussions (ST, of course). Lots of Dopers belong to BA and NoClueBoy’s board; there only a few on Cyburbia. Again, these aren’t formally associated with the Straight Dope and the Chicago Reader; they’re just operated by Dopers.
I don’t know much about SDMB-related LiveJournal communities, static pages, collective literary zines, recipe exchanges, mailing lists/listservs or IRC channels/servers.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no Doper equivalent of the fan-operated services that you see on communities like Something Awful; I don’t think there are any Doper-only Web hosting services, free e-mail services, image hosting and the like.
Waaaaaa! No link to “Wally Tries Cybersex”? Sounds like must-reading.
Which brings up another DopeQuirk: the Wally emoticon. There was a member known as Wally, since gone on to his reward (which, one hopes, includes free DSL service) who was in the habit of hurling the insult “Putz!” at various and sundry. The Wally Smilie was created in his memory.