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RIP RHDN

Hey all, I know I don't post on cohost much, but RHDN imploding is seismic, so, resharing. This is largely copy/pasted from other socials, so it won't contain anything you may not have already seen. Post follows.

So by now you've probably seen that romhacking.net 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, well, ever. Consequently it was costing its administrator hundreds of dollars per month. 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 their 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 them.

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.

You are of course, 100% right, Taskforce. In retrospect, it would have been much better and far easier to simply tell such individuals to simply not play it or translate it themselves if they wish and leave it at that, as you've said. However, the problem lay in the fact that I was not just speaking on behalf of our own translations, but rather those of every group that was ever driven away from RHDN by people there such as those that run amok and do nothing but constantly complain and demonize the ones that actually put in the effort to release romhacks and translations in the first place.

I was also stuck in a loop in which I was constantly accused of being tolerant of right-wing messages in translations, but not left-wing ones, which is not at all what I said. What I tried explaining to these people was that no one has the right to berate or harass a group for what they choose to put in their romhack/translation. For example, pressuring Tom to change a certain word in his Goemon translation was wrong, as was attacking Wildbill and our entire group in general over a message placed within the Super Shell Monsters Story translation. Which by the way, wasn't no where as big of a deal as some people made it out to be. Sure, it might have broken character a bit, but it was funny to see. Besides, what was so bad about it anyway? People these days sure get offended easily over nothing.

But yeah, I probably should not have allowed myself to sink down to their level. Simply ignoring and not engaging with such people is usually for the best, but some might see it as though you've "lost the argument" if you do so. Instead, I tried explaining my point to them as best as I could, but some were just not willing to listen to reason. Seeing that one fanatical leftist saying that they contribute more by virtue signaling and complaining instead of actually working on romhacks/translations themselves sure was laughable. These self-entitled type people really vex and put me in a bad mood, especially considering that they seem to be just about everywhere these days. So, I'll leave it at that for now. I see that the thread in question has now been locked at RHDN, which is probably for the best at this point, seeing as it devolved into nothing more than a back and forth trolling session by the end of it.

Edit: I also forgot to mention those that harassed Aishsha and the rest of his team about adding subs to the intro of his PoPoLoCrois translation, not just on RHDN, but also on his own site as well until he finally snapped at them. Then these people acted as it they were the victims and as those Aishsha and rest of his group were the unreasonable ones. And as usual, a large group of these leftists then went on to accuse him of being "ableist, racist, sexist" and just about everything else -ist in the liberal dictionary of false accusations and pandering narratives. Because hey, if you don't like someone or something, call them a horrible thing and then get them cancelled, right? Yeah, that's the leftist way! These kinds of people make me sick...