Alternatehistory.com

Commonly abbreviated to AH.com, currently the internet's largest Alternate History site since the collapse of Soc.history.what-if. Revolves around a discussion forum that has been in existence since 2000 and in its current form since 2004. Has produced a great deal of AH fiction output; a full list of timelines with links can be found here on the site's wiki.

AH.com has also produced some AH, science fiction and fantasy stories in the form of prose, which can be found here.

However, the forum's Off Topic section is also notable for having developed its own subculture over the years, filled with Running Gags and Memetic Mutation. All of this has found its expression in AH Dot Com the Series, a satirical comedy-cum-drama (Depending on the Writer) series parodying both common Alternate History settings and tropes, and more generically the futuristic sci-fi setting of the titular crosstime ship. The crew and most of the guest cast is made up of fictionalized forms of the Board's own members. If it can be categorized as a Self-Insert Fic, we can only conclude that most AH.commers are raving sadomasochists, given what usually happens to the crew.

In addition to the main Series, there have been several other similar productions, such as Luaky Commer and AH.com Wars (parodies of Harry Potter and Star Wars starring the characters from the Series), the Spin-Off AH Dot Com The Next Generation, and others.

As a disclaimer, however, much of the content, including the Future History, ASB and Off Topic sections, on the forum is accessible only to logged-on members. The main logic behind it (according to the moderators) is so that it would encourage people to sign up for the more "serious" discussion threads, with the rest available afterwards (with a Writers' Block section sensibly restricted for copyright reasons).

It also has a Shared Worlds section divided up into Shared Worlds, Large Games and Sandbox.

They have also created their own version of this very wiki, titled (of course) AH Tropes. It's currently in its infancy, so Wiki Magic is necessary.


 * AH Dot Com the Series
 * AH World Cup
 * Ad Astra Per Aspera
 * All Along the Watchtower
 * Anglo American Nazi War
 * A World of Laughter, A World of Tears
 * British Imperialism of the 19th Century
 * The Britwank Empire
 * A Central East
 * Chaos Timeline
 * The Creepy Teen Years
 * Damsels and Dirigibles
 * Decades of Darkness
 * Dying a Dream
 * Dystopic Return of Magic
 * Englishman
 * Fear, Loathing and Gumbo on the Campaign Trail '72
 * For All the Marbles
 * Green Antarctica
 * A Greater Britain
 * Her Diamond Heart
 * Hogwarts Exposed Timeline
 * Holding Out for A Hero Gustav Stresemann Survives
 * Lands of Red and Gold
 * Look to the West
 * The Navatlacas Heirs to Hernan And Montezuma
 * A More Personal Union
 * No Mans Land Tales From the Weird Wars
 * No Spanish Civil War in 1936
 * Now Blooms the Tudor Rose
 * Protect and Survive A Timeline
 * Reds
 * Superpower Empire China 1912
 * Swarm On the Somme
 * That Wacky Redhead
 * The Fountainhead Fillibuster Tales From Objectivist Katanga
 * Two Lucky Princes
 * Union and Liberty
 * United States of Ameriwank
 * Vive La Francewank
 * Weimar World
 * We'll Meet Again

Note that many of these timelines and scenarios (whether fully finished or not) are quite grand examples of Archive Panic. You have been warned...


 * Alternate History Wank: There are specific versions for individual countries ("Ameriwank", "Britwank", "Naziwank", "Sovietwank", "Byzantowank" etc.). Over-the-top wanks (usualy parodic by their very nature) are commonly referred to as "Alternate History Bukkake".
 * Space Filling Empire : Coined by board member Imajin after getting upset about how all too many Alternate History maps adhere to the lazy solution of All Nations Are Superpowers.


 * Alien Space Bats: The Trope Namer is soc.history.what-if, of which AH.com is a spiritual descendant.
 * American Civil War: One of the most (over)used counterfactual settings.
 * As You Know: This overly obvious mode of infodump tends to be frowned upon by the AH community as bad form, but can't always be avoided.
 * Ban on Politics: Averted. American Gun Politics was a recurring topic of heated debates, though by mid-2009 it had tended to be superseded by same-sex marriage and especially universal health care.
 * Berserk Button: The entire forum has a (memetic) tendency to get riled when people start talking about Operation Sealion (Hitler's plan to invade Britain) because discussion has long since been played out and there is a universal consensus that the plan was so badly conceived that its success was essentially impossible.
 * Over at the Chat sections, God help you if you a.) mention "TEH EVOL MUSLIMS WILL TAKE OVER DA WORLD" and/or b.) troll extremist or Conspiracy Theorist drivel.
 * Kindly avoid making Monty Python references. Yes, everyone does expect the Spanish Inquisition by now.
 * The British Empire: Another popular theme for scenarios (which usualy portray it in a positive and sympathetic light - though there is also quite a few deliberate deconstructions of this sentiment.)
 * Eagle Land: When "Ameriwank" scenarios come up, generally their authors have flavour #1 in mind and everyone else is pointedly reminded of flavour #2.
 * Everything's Better with Plushies: Several years ago, Alternate History Dot Com started the "Sealion World Tour". This joke project is still on-going in 2011. The members send a plush sealion named Sealion from one member to another, who'll take pictures and post them on the forum. Sealion has been to four continents so far and has last been seen in Brazil. The reason they used a sealion? It's an ironic mascot of the site, referencing a surprisingly popular yet horribly implausible AH scenario. Read the Berserk Button entry above.
 * It gets better when you find out the person who is supposed to receive said stuffed animal in the end is nicknamed on the forum... "The Overlord".
 * Fake Movie Real Trailer: This thread.
 * Fan Sequel and Fix Fic : Many published works of alternate history have received this experimental threatment over the years in various scenarios posted on the board. These unofficial re-imaginings and continuations are usualy of high quality. Her Diamond Heart is one of the re-imaginings of S.M. Stirling's Peshawar Lancers. Decades of Darkness was explicitly created as as an attempt to make a realistic timeline with an evil empire in the vein of The Draka, making it an Inspired By re-imagining of sorts. There's even an unofficial continuation of Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 series.
 * Follow the Leader: The premise of board member Big Tex's scenario The United States of Ameriwank is that a stranger from the future came to the Colonial America before the American Revolution intending to Set Right What Once Went Wrong by giving George Washington an Applied Phlebotinum to help America unite the world in the end. A lot of posters ended up creating stories on similar premise where a stranger from the future to do similar thing except with different nations instead of America. This phenomenon is known as the "Strangerverse" and has received several spinoffs (with the Brits, French, etc.), all connected by the same basic premise.
 * For Want of a Nail: Great care is usually taken by writers of counterfactual timelines in the choice of the point of divergence.
 * Insane Troll Logic: Did you know that atom bombs are a hoax perpetrated by Jewish tribalist uncles who sit inside nuclear reactors rubbing vaseline into potatoes ? Apparently, one (in)famous banned troll virulently believed in this. It became a minor meme on the site after his banning.
 * Other bits of famous AH.com troll logic include the idea that graffiting on pavements will cause gay couples to jump off bridges, and something to do with public trees on private land (or possibly private trees on public land). See here for more details.
 * Also, this thread, which is the stuff of legends. A ridiculously implausible Polish Alternate History Wank combined with several staggering examples of Artistic License History. And the troll responsible wasn't even Polish !
 * Mad Mathematician: Zyzzyva.
 * Mass Teleportation: Quite common in scenarios involving Alien Space Bats. The local term is ISOT, a verbed abbreviation derived from S.M. Stirling's novel Island in The Sea of Time.
 * Middle-Eastern Coalition: Routinely spoofed and skewed. Popular joke names include "the Randomid Caliphate", "Implausiblid Caliphate" and "The Obligatory Supercaliphate".
 * Misplaced Nationalism: Occurs a lot in the Chat threads.
 * No Name Given: The Sealion World Tour (see above) featured a stuffed toy sealion called...Sealion, because nobody could think of a suitable name. He was eventually dubbed "Silas" by the Brazilians, a Punny Name that only works in Portuguese.
 * Patriotic Fervour: Parodied, occasionally played straight.
 * Play By Post Game: The Shared Worlds section contains a variety of them, a good deal of them becoming stories unto themselves.
 * Running Gag : In addition to using some mainstream internet memes, AH.com has its own set.
 * There are also various related memes about the most common Cliche Storms seen in timelines (especially those of newbie authors preferring Alternate History Wank).
 * At one point, there was a tendency to give really sadistic Crapsack World scenarios the "Vlad Tepes Award" (aka Vlad Dracula, Vlad the Impaler). That name alone explains itself.
 * "If I see that damned Kazakh border one more time..."
 * The aforementioned "Eeebiiiil Muslim Middle-Eastern Coalition". A variant is the "Boat People's Caliphate", a mocking name for a hypothetical Indonesia-led alliance of south Asian Muslim countries (a staple of the already cliché scenario "random near future war between Indonesia and Australia").
 * Another notable running gag is that all the German members on the forum actually constitute a Hive Mind - despite their constant political arguments, which are held to be only an elaborate cover.
 * Scrapbook Story: Many of the best works on the site.
 * Serious Business: The Universal Map Colour Scheme (UCS).
 * Resulting in a feud over a proposed revision to UCS. The Change: moving Non-Communist Russia from a Gold-tone to a Green.
 * But then, it was Decided by One Vote (literally - 183 to 181), so obviously lots of people argued.
 * Shown Their Work : Because of their love for the genre, the members of the board try to do this as much as possible - even when writing deliberately silly and Rule of Fun scenarios and timelines.
 * Single-Issue Wonk: A lot of the banned trolls fall into this category.
 * Spell My Name with an "S": Nobody can ever agree on how to spell Colonel Gaddafi's name.
 * Testosterone Poisoning: At one point a beard-growing contest was held, with the winner being given the title of "Ultimate AH.com Macho Manly Mountain Man In The Height Of His Manliness".
 * The Wiki Rule : A pretty informative place if you want to get into understanding and writing alternate history.
 * The Other Wiki: Wikipedia has a (not entirely undeserved) reputation on the forum for being subject to bias by nationalist administrators: running gags and Flanderisation focus on Poles and Armenians, but there are plenty from many other countries as well. All this material was used in the AH Dot Com the Series two-parter "Citation Needed".
 * Hence why its nicknames include "Polonopedia" and "The Armenian Genocide", or simply The Genocide.
 * There's also an increased awareness of TV Tropes on the forum as well. Though some see it as overflowing with Anime and Ho Yay.
 * Unknown Rival: Alternia.
 * Worthy Opponent: Othertimelines.com, before it went down at least.
 * Zeppelins from Another World: Generally seen as a codeword for "this timeline shouldn't be taken entirely seriously." They've been sporked as a cliche, but everyone still admits that they're too cool not to put in somewhere.