I personally really enjoyed Library at Mount Char, that it sits next to Shadow of the Torturer is somewhat telling to me. Though personally I'd place them at different ends, they do end up both being rather moody and have similar themes of emotional development during hard times... However I'm not really a fan of Shadow to begin with so maybe I "didnt get it".

Yeah I think that the ideal way to run polls like this is for people to rank the items they are knowledgeable about against each other. Then you can establish a chain of "grimdarkness" where you say, "people are about equally likely to rank this above that, so they have about the same score, but everyone who has read both says that's darker than this, so we give it a higher score."

Personally I think Torturer is a bit dreary and sad and of course it takes place on a waning Earth where things are not as they ought to be. But uh it isn't packed to the gills with child rape and torture like Library at Mount Char. I do think Prince of Thorns is dark, but I would also put it below Library. Definitely, The Blade Itself is not close to POT or TDTCB. I put the second apocalypse series as a whole above any of the other stories on this list that I've read, simply because all the other stories listed have a happy ending.

I still can't download a database from SMF and I noticed it takes quite a bit of time to clear after we've rejected Spam-Sranc before the pending users notation disappears.

Thanks again for all you guys have done.

Thank you both for your comments. Still working on contacting Sovin, but I'll be sure to bring it up.

New error, or at least newly discovered since I don't normally hit New Replies but clicked it on accident. Was redirected to this page:

DATABASE ERROR
Expression #1 of ORDER BY clause is not in SELECT list, references column 'saproduction.t.id_last_msg' which is not in SELECT list; this is incompatible with DISTINCT
File: /var/www/www.second-apocalypse.com/Sources/Recent.php
Line: 1105

Note: It appears that your database may require an upgrade. Your forum's files are currently at version SMF 2.0.17, while your database is at version 2.0.4. The above error might possibly go away if you execute the latest version of upgrade.php.

Well, I would certainly know how to fix this error if given access to the database calling code ( it's either from application call to the database or stored code in the database ). If a patch fixes this, then it's 50/50 it can be fixed in the code ( meaning the code could be fine as written, but triggering a database bug ).

Note: all the diacritics seem completely fucked.