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After participating in the lulzy Great Habbo Raid of July 2008, I couldn't wait for next year's big July raid. The target this year was Habbo Australia, as we had raided American and Canadian Habbo Hotel in previous years. As this wasn't my first raid, I was a bit more prepared this year than I was for the July 2008 raid: in addition to taking screenshots, I also recorded (using 
, obviously) original video footage of the raid, which I then edited into a raid video that I uploaded to my YouTube account (back when I still maintained one) shortly after the day of the raid, which was 12 July 2009. I also downloaded LOLToast's Raid Tool this time and used it during the raid to spam the game's chat.
Sadly, some weeks after the raid my computer got so badly infected with some damn malware that I was forced to restore to a pre-installed factory image on my hard drive. Though by then I had already begun backing up my personal data, for some reason I had neglected to back up both my screenshots and my videos (both the raw footage and the edited video) of the raid prior to restoring to the factory image; those have now been forever lost to time. It is very fortunate, however, that I had at least uploaded the edited raid video to YouTube, as afterwards I was able to download it from that site, and thereby obtain a (lower-quality) copy of the original, which has been carefully preserved on my hard drive ever since. That copy of the original raid video was uploaded to my VidLii account on the 10th anniversary of this raid.
Unlike the July 2008 raid, I don't think I logged on before the official day of the raid on 12 July to do some early pool blocking, but my memory is rather hazy on this. Like the previous year, I made the raid account (and most likely a few extra accounts) well ahead of the day of the raid so there wouldn't be any last-minute issues, and I lurked /b/ for probably an hour or two before the official start time, looking for any threads concerning the raid so that I could stay updated on any new developments in planning. Although I cannot remember exactly, I believe that, like the July 2008 raid, a bunch of private rooms were created for the raiders to assemble in prior to the raid's official start time; I probably joined one of these rooms for a little while and met some of my fellow raiders before we all flooded into the main rooms of the hotel.
While most folks adopted the standard raider's appearance, a few rather creative fellows decided to dress up as particular characters: in my raid video, I can spot /b/rothers who decided to play a black Santa, Adolf Hitler, Pedobear, and a black Klansman
, as well as a few communists. I remember that, by July 2009, while the in-game avatars were still solid
like before, the developers of Habbo had made it so that it was possible to walk through other players if they were standing on the squares directly adjacent to the entrance of the room, as well as the squares on either side of the ladders leading to the pools. It was thus still possible to block the pools and other sections of the room—or even access to the entire room itself—but more /b/rothers were needed to accomplish this; it was no longer possible for one person to block the entire pool, or for one or two people to block off the entire room. In a raid as large as the July 2009 one, however, this was not a problem: we merely formed large walls of raiders around the entrance of the room and the pool, and once again the Habbos were denied their use.
I probably participated in this raid for a few hours to half a day, during the peak hours of activity. Despite the fact that we once again saved many Habbos from the AIDS by closing the pool, and despite the formation of swastiGETS (including the one that materialized near the end of my edited raid video), the general post-raid sentiment on 4chan seemed to be that this year's raid was pretty lacking and not very successful; it was not a complete failure, but it was less lulzy than the July 2008 raid, and certainly nothing close to the great July 2006 or July 2007 raids. On Encyclopedia Dramatica, for example, there exist articles for both the previous year's July raid and the next year's July raid (which was largely considered a success), but there is no article for this raid.
Still, I had a lot of fun taking part in it—to me, it was just as entertaining as the previous year's big July raid. My only regret after all these years is not backing up my images and videos of this great event.
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This page last modified on 4 September 2021.