Nope! An age old problem since the dawn of internet communities "Drama" && "Power Tripping Leftoid Moderators".
Official Statement From the The Admin (Nightcrawler)
Highlighted the parts that matter - the rest is just him stroking himself.
https://www.romhacking.net/
It’s been a good near 20 year run, but for various reasons it’s time to wind things down. The site achieved almost everything it set out to do, and far exceeded it. We joined hacking and translation communities together for the first time ever. We outlasted and eclipsed ROM hacking sites that came before us. We brought ROM hacking from niche and fragmented to global and centralized. We assembled the largest force of ROM hackers on the planet. We brought learning resources and accessibility to a much wider range of people. We made major progress legitimizing and pulling ROM hacking from underground dark web type material to something much more accepted by the mainstream. We paved a much easier path for all of those that will come after us. No doubt, this site changed ROM hacking forever. It will leave behind the legacy of those accomplishments to remember.
Things sure have changed since the beginning days. I miss the times when I was able to interact with a smaller group of supportive people to collaborate with rather than the entire world. Having gone from an unknown fledgling site to an infinitely growing and globally known one made sustainability very challenging. The site became so busy with 24/7 use, endless queues, and an endless inbox. It’s a very different world than it was in 2005. Copyright pressures increased dramatically with takedowns and legal burden. The site shifted from serving mostly contributing humans to bots and overzealous people abusing resources. They drowned everybody else out. The need for the site has lessened over time. There are now many options for community discussions, open source projects, and file storage across the Internet. For a while, I was looking to find a successor within the circles of site supporters. I asked several potential people, but the stars did not align.
I was finally looking to wind things down at the end of last year. I wanted to provide the site database and file archive to the general public. At that time, an internal group suddenly emerged with an offer to help continue the site. I questioned their intentions, but I thought it could prove to be a more community friendly path forward. However, it turned out to be the opposite. We had a rocky phase 1, moving the downloads into their possession. When I went to startup phase 2, I discovered a most dishonest and hate filled group. I learned that I had been dehumanized for a very long time. My personal details had been given out. Secret deceitful plots had been made to cut me out, and drop a bomb like I am a target to destroy. My family has seen this and after discussion, we are immediately ceasing all related site operations. We are cutting ties to Discord and Twitter social media outlets, and will have no further contact with these individuals. Lines were crossed. I had hoped this community especially would have learned from what happened to Near. This behavior is not OK for handling disagreements, miscommunication, anger, or anything else.
We have released the site database (sans account and/or profile information) as well as all of the files and images to the Internet Archive. In summary:
Internet Archive of Database and Download Files
All Submissions other than News are permanently closed.
All sections of the site will remain up as read only.
Downloads and images will be available for as long as DarkSol, FCAndChill Calico will allow.
Forum will remain up
Twitter and Discord affiliations have ended. Anything further from these outlets do NOT represent myself or ROMhacking.net.
I look forward to seeing what projects will emerge with the site data for the next generation. From what I have seen, it may be a good time to start an open source initiative for a new site. I’d love to hear about what projects you are working on!
I thank all of the many staff and community members whom kept the wheels turning and the lights on over the years. I am proud of our many accomplishments here together. I will carry forward remembering the good times, laughing about the bad times, and knowing she was right for the time, but time has a way of moving on.
This is ROMhacking.net as we knew her signing off…
I was curious what some of the anti-community sites would say.
https://www.baddesthacks.net/
Note: If you read the original text of this article - all the accusations made are sourced with screenshots - I couldn't be ****** to actually include it though.
This statement resonates a lot for me. I'm not an expert on all the ins and outs of the rom hacking community. I usually just interact with it enough on burner accounts to get what I need to play modded games then **** off but frankly - this clown world **** is so ubiquitous across all gaming communities and git repos now that it's almost a playbook.Nightcrawler is blaming his staff. The staff are blaming his unavaliablilty, Gideon Zhi is blaming Nightcrawler.
people in the RHDN discord are worrying about pronouns and trying to “distance themselves” from RHDN.
People with their heads pretty far up their asses are even trying to blame romhacks.org despite nobody involved even mentioning them as a cause, or them even remotely being related to the story of “my mods talked **** about me behind my back”.
Where do i lie? Well i’m going to miss RHDN, but no more than i already have. Nightcrawler made his bed. he allowed these people he thought were trustworthy to run his community. He was absent. he didnt want to manage things. He didnt even know what his staff were doing many times. so he let people drive it into the ground and turn it into a hotbed of ideological purity spirals, where politics overruled talent. where a guy can be a step away from adding a lost character to a game and be derided for being “nesticle grade”. a place where people asking for entry level help get turned away because how dare they need to explain anything to the peons. A site where a user can follow other users to multiple platforms and harass them, and then still be awarded with a staff position. where rules only apply if they didn’t like what you said, and false accusations could abound but defending yourself would get your posts deleted. where admins will go sit in the chats of other sites so they can run off and tattle that someone said a bad word because they didn’t like a mod decision in the hopes of getting you banned for things you said OFFSITE. These kinds of things happen when your moderation staff have absolutely no contributions to the hobby they moderate.
of COURSE these people were talking about him behind his back.
These people have only treated him as well as they’ve treated the community he let them run.
In the meanwhile, we’re still here. Romhacks.org is a running alternative, with its own submissions system, that are more than happy to clarify rules in their Discord server, and are growing despite the lies and “guilt by association” because they dared let us defend ourselves in their chat. plenty of other forums are slow, but still outliving RHDN. Zophars Domain is still alive, sorta. Acmlm is still technically running. SMBArena on discord has put out some amazing hacks. Romhacking.com is doing… well… whatever it is they do. they honestly kinda suck unless youre into mario 64 speedrunning.
We’ll hopefully all get over this, come out better for it, and hopefully learn the right lessons about letting mentally ill people manage your community.
They don’t actually care about the hobby they pretend to be involved in,
they don’t like you,
and they will always stab you in the back for more control.
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If I find anything else interesting I'll post it.
