And back to being (mostly) free again! Praise be! And we have smilies and BBCode - will wonders never cease! It’s like I woke up in an alternate timeline - a much cooler one than the one I left! Does search work? Has the whole database been lost recently? And most importantly, did what’s-his-name ever manage to rid his yard of gophers?
I’ve been here for a decade, and we’ve had smileys and BBCode the whole time - you haven’t been here in a while, dude. Search is not awesome, but we are Google indexed now, so if you know how to phrase things, you can use that to find what you need. The database remains reasonably intact, as far as I know. (There was the Winter of Our Missed Content, but that was in, what, 2003?) Not sure about Scylla’s yard, but you can ask him, since he’s still around (I think he went by a different name back in the Evil Nazi Gopher era.)
Scylla, that’s right - and yes, there was definitely a name change. His yard is the whole reason I finally created an account instead of just browsing 
As for BBCode and smilies, there was some problem…at some point…with some horrendous troll posting a script that replaced the banner at the top with something else (maybe a different banner, maybe nothing at all). It was just a proof-of-concept I think but the mods took it pretty hard. Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong and we used to have ‘real’ HTML script before that incident…
We used to allow HTML, and now we don’t. And we won’t.
Aha, so the second remembrance was the right one. HTML is a fine thing to avoid.