Thread by @GideonZhi

Alright, I think I've condensed my thoughts. There's a lot here, so, thread incoming:

By now you've probably seen that is effectively dead. In the end, it's probably for the best; the site was built in the mid aughts and its backend hadn't been re-engineered... ever. Consequently it was costing its administrator hundreds of dollars/month.romhacking.net

Nightcrawler, the admin, was burnt out, and I sympathize. I'm burnt out too! But he existed as a single point of failure for the site and exerted iron-fisted control over community-created content, and categorically refused basically all offers of help over the last decade.

Remember all those times the site went down, and stayed down for days at a time? It's because nobody had NC's contact information, only he could bring the site back up, and whenever anyone pointed out that the situation was less than ideal, they were rebuffed.

In Dec '23, NC posted about an imminent shutdown. Staff offered to help. It was initially refused. The site was originally going to just be turned off -- no archive, no handoff, nothing. 20 years of community contributions just *gone*.

NC claimed to want a successor (singular) to build a new site, but his requirements were unrealistic by any measure. Said successor would have needed to have passion for the hobby, have donated to the site in the past several years (despite no donations being taken)...

...and the technical know-how to actually administer an archival platform of RHDN's size. A real unicorn. Of course, none presented themselves, and no effort was ever actually made to seek one out.

After lengthy negotiation NC eventually acquiesced to handing off datacrystal, and to swapping out the file-serving back end with an S3 bucket as an initial transition step while a replacement could be built. It'd help relieve the cost burden.

It took a lot of convincing, and I don't think he really understood that S3 was *way* more cost-effective than the way files were currently being served. At one point he posted "Sending thumb drives to Canada doesn't help" like he couldn't just upload the files into the bucket.

One real kick in the teeth came after switching the back-end to AWS S3. AWS was the initial pick because it was obvious that if something didn't happen fast, the site would die, and AWS was the easiest initial choice.

Discord staff set up the S3 bucket, and had to walk NC through the changes that needed to be made to the back-end. To help reduce the financial burden on NC, Discord staff gladly offered to pay the S3 bill -- to the tune of $200 or so per month.

After some further research, it became apparent that Discord staff could save a significant amount of money by changing S3 providers. The new bucket was set up, but when the time came to make the change NC refused to do it, even though he was not the one footing the bill.

Staff grew increasingly frustrated. Days would pass without response from NC. He refused to join the Discord to talk about solutions in real-time. Did we vent in private? Sure. Did we dox or threaten? Fucking hell, no! And frankly I'm LIVID at even the suggestion that we did.

I'm even angrier at comparisons being drawn between disgruntled staff and the scum-suckers that drove Near to end his life. What happened to Near is an absolute tragedy and I sincerely hope there's a special place in Hell for the human garbage that tormented him.

So, yeah. Mourn for RHDN. But this was not the outcome anyone wanted, and Nightcrawler is *not* the victim here.

Oh, and for those offering RHDO (won't link) as an alternative? It's not. For so many reasons, it's not.

And finally, it's been pointed out that towards the end of their life Near used they/them pronouns. I'd forgotten this and am mortified at misgendering them :(