About TL.net

About TeamLiquid

Purpose and History

TeamLiquid is a news and community website centered around Blizzard's StarCraft: Brood War and StarCraft 2, as well as Valve's Dota 2. Here you'll find everything you need to know about these professional scenes, including pro-gaming news and information, videos, strategies, and replays. Powered by over 100 staff members from all over the world, we maintain a Wiki called Liquipedia chock full of relevant information for these scenes, a database of every professional StarCraft game ever played in the TLPD, extensive news coverage of events, and an extremely active forum where thousands of users interact every minute of the day.

Founded in 2002 by Victor Goossens and Joy Hoogeveen, TeamLiquid has grown into the largest StarCraft and StarCraft 2 community on the internet. Today, we receive over two million unique visitors each month and we have become more than just a news and message board. TL runs its own tournaments like the $25,000+ prize pool TSL and other live programs like Liquibition exhibition matches and the fan favorite TL: Attack! where pros chat and play with TL members. Our site also functions as a central hub for tournaments, events, and offline meetups.

Community

Our forums are home to one of the most passionate, loyal, and active userbases in video gaming. We feel that our community is an anomaly. We've grown larger and stronger every year even as StarCraft aged past a decade. With the release of StarCraft 2 we grew even larger and more expansive, with subsections dedicated to games like LoL and Diablo being founded, with the addition of Dota 2 we have grown even more, and will likely continue expanding and growing as a community.

We maintain our forums with open, honest, and direct moderation. Our goal is to create a place that both promotes interesting discussion but leaves room for familiarity and fun. You won't see us hopping on bandwagons or making fast and hard changes, as our way has always been one of careful deliberation and consistency. But when we do act, when we do change, we will look to do it with our own style and flair.

You may have heard that our moderation is strict. Compared to many other places, that's probably true, as it is our goal to provide a place where intelligent discussion and a respectful community can prosper. We give our moderators discretion to use common sense and inject personality into their interaction with forum users.

Frequently Asked Questions
1. TL has so many features. Can you just list all essential links?

2. What do the different icons and different colored names mean?

Each regular user has an icon rank assigned using a formula based on registration date and post count. You can change which race your icon is in your user profile. Additionally, you will see many different icons and colors on the forum that all mean different things.

Users with dark blue post headers and white text are TeamLiquid Administrators. These users speak for TL.net officially and can be considered "employees" of the site.
Users with red names are called "Moderators" and they usually coordinate large projects and sections of TeamLiquid as well as moderate the forum.
Users with pen icons are members of TL's writing team. These guys do the bulk of the news coverage on our front page.
Users with brush icons are members of TL's graphics (FX) team. They draw and design everything from video overlays to news banners. Anything that is a custom graphic on TL originated from someone on our graphics team.
Users with globe or puzzle icons are Liquipedia team members. They write articles for our StarCraft and Pro-Gaming related wiki.
Users with speech bubble icons are part of our translation team. They take Korean or Chinese articles or interviews and translate them into English so we can get news about the progaming scene over in Asia.
Users with TLPD icons, are part of the TLPD team. They are responsible for updating tlpd with every relevant game played and making sure the information there is accurate and timely.
Users with red hammers are banlings, who are veteran forum users who moderate the forum exactly like red name moderators do.
Users with running horses are somehow involved with the Teamliquid pro teams, either dedicated to providing exclusive coverage for them, players in the teams themselves, managers or otherwise directly helping with that.

You will also see many custom icons that are unique to an individual user. All red and blue names get to choose their own custom icon and many others have custom icons for various reasons as well.

All the icons listed above are placed to the left of a username. There are several icons placed to the right of the username such as Liquibet and Fantasy PL trophies as rewards for winning a season and blue stars which recognize contributing forum members.

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