"SB is involved. It's already Gone Horribly Wrong."
SpaceBattles.com
, often known as "SpaceBattles" or simply "SB", is a message board dedicated to creativity and geek culture. While far from the largest community on the Internet, it's still extremely popular and growing with over 125,000 active members as of July 2023.
On August 25, 2025, a site admin announced the opening of a sibling site: AltHistory (not to be confused with AlternateHistory.com).
It has four major forum sections:
- Fiction Discussion: A section dedicated to all kinds of discussion related to geek culture, entertainment media, and fiction in general. Includes a general discussion forum, a forum focused on gaming, and versus debates involving fictional opponents.
- Creative Works: A section for creative works by members of the site. Includes a creative writing forum, a forum for story ideas and recommendations, and a forum for art and design.
- Creative Interaction: A section for interactive fiction creations by members of the site. Includes forums for quests (interactive stories), roleplaying, and grand strategy.
- The Real World: A section dedicated to real world subjects. Includes the Water Cooler forum for casual conversations, a forum for news and society topics, and a forum focused on actual militaries and equipment.
This website provides examples of...
- April Fools' Day: The website always changes its logo on April Fools' Day. For example, the 2021 logo was a tank with the title "GROUNDBATTLES", and 2022 brought a weird series of emojis that more or less channeled UwU and cutesy stuff.
- On 2005, there was a thread opened claiming 1) there was Jar Jar porn in it and that whoever would look at it would get banned. One guess at what happened.
- On 2007, a world filter was installed that changed normal words into profanity. and "government" into "gods".
- On 2009, everyone's name was changed to "Shakkara".
- On 2015, the forum's background was replaced by a picture of a toucan. It went badly.
- 2016 saw the website turned into the Church of Connor, with all forum renamed for the day.
- Ascended Meme: For a few years, pictures of toucans were a Berserk Button among users, to the point staff would ban anyone who posted themnote . Nowadays there are official toucan-themed awards that users can gift to each other, as well as toucan icons available to some users.
- Ban on Politics: It is not allowed to discuss politics in any forums other than "Whitehall", the website's dedicated politics subforum.
- Fan Fic: Has an entire subsection dedicated to them, and hosts quite a few notable fics.
- Hypothetical Fight Debate: Half the point of the forum is to debate who would win a certain matchup. There is a dedicated section in the forums for them; in fact, this is why the website was founded.
- Logo Joke: The website logo changes on major holidays such as Christmas or Ramadan. There is even an official site news thread dedicated to the logos.
- Long Runner: The current form of the forums has been traced back to April 15, 1999, meaning it passed its 25th anniversary in 2024, and the site itself is even older. Though the early days of the site are shrouded in mystery and lost data, it has existed at least since 1998 and possibly since 1996, which is an absolute eternity for a website. For comparison, it's only a year younger than Google, and might actually be older if the suggestions of existence in 1996 are true.
Atlan: "SB is twenty years old now. As far as forums go, that's not just ancient, that's damn near prehistoric. We're the T-rex of online forums. Kinda big, old, looks funny, weird behavior, and obsessed with killing stuff."
- Nuke 'Em: One of SpaceBattles' catchphrases is the classic "Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.", and the implication of the "one, at sufficient velocity" meme.
- Play-by-Post Games: What the Role-Playing Games take the form of, considering it's a forum. In particular, it hosts enough Forum Quests to have an entire section devoted to them.
- Role-Playing Games: A subforum and a sub-subforum dedicated to different versions of this. Including the "BROB" forum, which has had adversarial relations with the other roleplay forum in the past.
- Shout-Out: While writing posts, the window keeps track of the word count. After a certain point, the note writes "Over nine thousand words, specifically [insert number here]".
- Treasure Hunt Episode: A variation. There are occasionally in-site treasure hunts in the form of inviting users to search for certain things (like pictures of foxes or the Holy Grail) in the posts of specific users within a given time limit. The site then awards people with special insignias and labels that appear beneath their usernames and profile pictures as a Bragging Rights Reward.
