What's going on here?

[PoLiX]

For years, nearly 11yrs now, I have been pestered to bring back SSForum. Until February of this year, I ignored that call completely and didn't even play the game anymore. Occasionally logging in just to keep my account alive and see how much the population had dropped.

This past February, while talking to a friend from another game, he mentioned wanting to create his own fan discord or forum for it. I offered to help if he really wanted to go for it and he asked me what experience I had. After we talked about my history here and with a few other games, he mentioned SubSpace looked so decentralized and was probably doomed to die. For the first time in 11 years, I felt a bit of nostalgia about the game. I also felt some responsibility for that decentralization by shutting down all my sites back in November 2014.

I talked to a few people that month about why I had truly left, expecting them to tell me it was stupid, but many agreed they would have done the same thing. They weren’t mad nor did they blame me for my actions but told me the community was far better now than it was then.

I did leave due to my grandfather’s passing, but it had nothing to do with the cost of the license or server. That was just an excuse as every time I shared the reason that I wasn’t active, I just got all sorts of grief about it. My grandmother needed help and that was my focus, not this game, not the websites. Once he passed that went up 10-fold, hell, 100-fold. People just focused on the game and told me “That sucks, but I need your help” or “I don’t care, I need <insert some little truly insignificant thing>.” I didn’t see why I was spending money or time on a community who seemed to care so little about each other. Not that I expect it to be all touchy feely (I am totally not that type of person), but I expected at least a little sympathy and “well, once you have a few minutes, that’d be great.”

As a NetOp I saw the worst of the community daily. People getting banned for all sorts of vile stuff (racism, child pornography, cyberbullying) on top of the regular stupidity, and I had already begun to question what this game’s chat channels were enabling. The stuff we caught was only on the surface; I was sure of that. Once I stepped away from NetOp, people told me all sorts of things that were going on, they just didn’t want to share it before because they didn’t want their “friends” to get in trouble. My line in the sand had far been crossed, and I was no longer interested in being part of it all. I made the decision to shut down my sites, came up with a reason that in my opinion was hard to argue with, and walked away. I was no better than the other liars, but at least it was my last.

Flashback to February and I decided to restore some centralized web community for the game. There were sooo many projects, I didn’t think SubSpace was just SubSpace or Continuum anymore. I decided maybe it was best to come up with something to categorize everything the community was building for this Massively Multiplayer Online Game. TheMMOG.com was born and had some traction. Then began the pouring in of messages and requests to “bring SSForum back”. The database truly had multiple corrupt rows and even tables of data. Some I wasn’t sure I could drop without causing issues with functionality of the software or addons. Some it just checked if they were there, not even using them ever it seemed.

I spent the last few days (almost 12hrs yesterday alone) working through the database removing data, restoring it from old backups I used Disk Drill to find on old hard drives, and I was able to get a functioning database. I ran Invision’s upgrader to bring the forum from version 3.4 all the way to version 4.7 with a lot of headaches, but in the end success. A normal 30-minute upgrade took me almost 6 hours. I was able to save it all in the end and now have a fully functional database and cleaner installation.

This will be here for the community to do as they wish with, hopefully positive. Read the history for nostalgia, post new posts (I know Samapico and others made many bug fixes on DCME), or connect with old friends in PMs. The domain has auto renewed for years, the server cost is minimal, and the software license, while ridiculous, I’ll just cover. Maybe I’ll convert to free software, maybe not.

Anyways… Enjoy!

[Death+]

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[PoLiX]

Reading posts in our private forum, I feel less and less guilty about it all. Multiple posts about how the community was just becoming toxic and crap.

Luckily, I think most of those individuals have left. Not all, but most.