[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

2008: The site is sued by the Tolkien Estate when it becomes clear that the entire Tolkien corpus can be compiled from quotations in The Books. The site is defended by a terrifying alliance of members from the legal profession, and as a side effect the Downs comes to own the rights to every word Tolkien ever wrote. Mithadan's ruthless enforcement of these rights leads to most of the English language becoming unusable for commercial purposes. It is replaced in television adverts by an obscure dialect of Swahili.

2010: A new forum is opened in which students may study for a Barrow degree in Tolkien Studies. Eventually this eclipses all of the world's major universities, to the extent that all of the most respected academics are employed by the Barrow-Wight. Oxford and Cambridge vie in a contest of forged documents as each attempts to prove that it set up the site in the first place.

2013: The Downs is awarded nihil obstat status by the Pope.

2015: Owing to a mix-up at the printer's, the fortieth Harry Potter book consists of two days' worth of logs from the chat room. It is nominated for the Booker Prize, but defeated by Green Thoughts in the Heliotropic Spiral by Eustacia Psmyth. The number of Downs members accessing the site in a single hour exceeds the latter's entire readership elevenfold.

2018: The Re-unification of the Entish Bow finally reaches its conclusion. Owing to the philosophical depth of its closing posts, it forms the basis of a new religion, which is the first to exist only on the Internet. The chief prophet of this cult is Vogonwë Brownbark, and the liturgy consists entirely of rambling doggerel, the commission for writing which makes Diamond18 the richest Downer in history. The entire writing team is excommunicated, and nihil obstat revoked. The site's member list exceeds the length of the electoral roll of Greater London within a month.

2019: The canonicity debate spreads beyond the forum and causes an uprising in Derbyshire and civil war in Switzerland. Eventually the entire world puts aside every other difference in favour of either the reader's opinion or the author's intent. The resultant conflict causes the destruction of several major cities, the collapse of the United Nations and a slight lag in the chat room.

2021: The Best Avatar thread is made into a feature film. It breaks all previous records, but is accused of dumbing down the original by many members.

2030: Sharkû is appointed Professor of Comparative Germanic Philology at the Sorbonne. For some reason he begins to write at least thirty posts a day, and rapidly accumulates the largest count of any member.

2033: The Downs declares its independence from the World Wide Web and becomes the world's first virtual state. Citizens of the Barrow-Downs cease to be subject to the laws of their own countries and instead are required only to observe the forum regulations. A dot-matrix print-out of these becomes the basis of a constitution so convoluted and riddled with inherently contradictory amendments that the word 'Byzantine' is supplanted by 'Downsian' in common English usage.

2525: (if Man is still alive), the discovery of some long-lost back-up discs throws new light on the social history of the early twenty-first century. In particular, Middle-earth Mirth is interpreted as a single composition: an extended post-modernist allegory of the chaos of human existence. It becomes a standard text in the study of English literature, but eventually is dropped from the syllabus when twenty-first-century English is deemed too challenging for undergraduates.
By this time, the English of the forum is studied as a foreign language. The official academic standard has become what we term 'chat-speak', with all SMS abbreviations and most of 1337 having been absorbed into everyday speech. The forum records are well known among senior academics, and are hotly debated in philological journals. One of the most contentious issues is the meaning of Estelyn's personal title.