This smiling guy came about some time ago when OCR member Midee found the original image on www.somethingawful.com, and wrote the words "Nice Work" on it. From there, it was used periodically as a smart assed remark referring to a minimal accomplishment that someone made a big deal out of (generally, someone posting that they reached "X" number of posts, etc.). Others began using the pic and making edits of it, and eventually, the edits became so numerous, that a thread was created to house them. That first thread (made by Digital Coma) didn't last long , but a second thread was made (by endblink) a short while after the first one died. Eventually, analoq decided that perhaps the edits should be gathered up into an archive. So, he grabbed all he could find, and put them together some time around the end of 2002. From there, The Coop took over maintaining the archive until the "Nice Thread v2" was deleted due to inactivity in the Summer of 2005.

During that time, there was a site where an archive of the edits that had been done could be gotten. OCR member Queezenorph was hosting them for a while, with The Coop sending him updates to add to the hosted archive. Unfortunately, Queezenorph seemed to lose interest in helping, and abruptly stopped taking the updates at the very beginning of 2004. Eventually, the hosted archive, and Queezenorph's site, vanished.

In the Fall of 2005, The Coop made a "v3" of the Nice Thread, and he continued archiving the new edits as they were posted there. During this thread's run, on January 10th of 2006, the archive finally got a new home. Rama was generous enough to donate webspace for it, and Xerol was kind enough to set up the account for The Coop to regularly update it himself. This archive can be found here.

Sadly, the third version of the thread was deleted when UnMod was the recipient of a pruning that got rid of roughly half the threads there, about a week before the big forum switch from phpBB to vBulletin on Dec. 30th, 2006. A fourth thread was made by The Coop on the new vBulletin forums, but a week later, it too was deleted when the entirety of UnMod was axed from OCR. However, with the birth of OCR's new forum "Off Topic" on Jan.14th, 2007, a fifth iteration of the Nice Work thread was made by The Coop, and it's currently still having edits slowly trickle in.

- This is an emoticon version of the Nice Work Guy which The Coop made for everyone on the OCR boards.

- This is the Nice Work Guy avatar, also done by The Coop, with some contrast adjustments by djp.

Kudos to djp for using them both.

And here's the infamous (unofficial) OCR mascot himself...

-- The Coop