kugmoROMhacking.net Moves to News Only, Database and File Archive Released to Internet Archive
CadeillacDamn, this is unfortunate
WatDabneyThat’s a shame.
It feels like the end of an era.
Noble ShiftFucking Nintendo
missingnoFor once, it doesn't sound like Nintendo had anything to do with this one. Seems to have been some kind of internal conflict within the community.
kratoz29With Discord and Twitter communities? I wonder how that happened!
My feelings are more so directed at this environment that Nintendo has fostered; maybe they didn’t have any direct involvement in this situation, but their constant litigations are fanning the flames and it’s depressing seeing this news so often. Their constant involvement is making this worse and more prevalent.
The increased police presence may not be the main reason your plug decides to leave, it may be because he’s losing customers, but having the increased police activity will still contribute to his final decision to leave the area.
katy ✨should also blame apple for the wave of emulators which no doubt saw a rise in downloading roms.
It has nothing to do with Nintendo or litigation.
RandomStickmanAw man. At least it's archived.
So what happens if the Internet Archive goes away?
That would be like losing the Library of Alexandria all over again.
We need to archive the archive, and maybe have it in the middle of international waters.
Prevent it from being lost by seeding the torrent. (All Internet Archive items automatically have one.)
This is a real bummer. The hacks will say up, but no new uploads. At least there’ll be people who still make rom hacks, though. (I hope they don’t all operate on Discord.)
ChozoI wonder if anybody would be interested in running a Lemmy community for them.
I wouldn’t be able to run it, but I would subscribe to it.
MonomateYeah, the ideal outcome is someone using the site dump on Archive.org to create a sucessor site. The longer it gets done, the more people will rely on Dicord to host romhacks, which is terrible for discoverability.
Hopefully any new site keeps the high standards romhacking dot net upheld; it’s way too easy to make a hack that unintentionally breaks other things in a game.
Regarding Discord, its un-openness to the 'net at large is definitely a prominent issue. But another problem (based on my limited experience) is that its people just aren’t very friendly. It’s like a large portion of them are annoyed at having to interact with other people. I don’t know why that is or even if it’s true, but that’s the feeling I got from it.
Just to be clear - there is no nearest-alternative site, is there? Honestly the only other site I’ve seen release things is gbatemp, and a forum format scales very poorly for releasing and finding romhacks.
DrasglafI’ve seen romhacks.org come up somewhere else, but I’ve also read rumours that this other site’s admin bullied Nightcrawler. More investigation is required, I guess.
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!
Ok…how can the Fediverse can help?
SludgehammerWell… I’m glad I grabbed the translation patches for Metal Max two and three earlier this week.
bsky.app/profile/…/3kypgqcah6k2p
Gideon Zhi has some more context on Bluesky. Sounds like the main (only) admin made things… difficult.
Gideon Zhi (@gideonzhi.bsky.social)
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. https://romhacking.net
SuperFolaFor those without bsky, cohost.org/gideonzhi/post/7131478-rip-rhdn
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.
Thanks for posting that.
Holy shit, the backend was Wordpress… 💀
s38b35M5Holy shit, the backend was Wordpress
Of RDHO, not RDHN
Maxnmy'sI’m glad everything has been archived. Where are people going to share rom hacks now? Super Mario 64 and Super Mario World stuff have their own website. Niche things are going to be harder to find.
Probably discord where they can be memory-holed automatically since it’s such a terrible platform.
God, I fucking hate how small communities gravitate to Discord. It’s such a trash platform for a complete community package, but everyone uses it because it’s free. It’d be a lot better if communities just relied on it for chat, but no, critical information is left in ever expanding chat logs, and participation in any capacity at all requires explicitly joining.
VikAnd the client apps gradually get worse and worse.
DuckGuyThis is terrible news.
XNXHere’s a post that goes more in depth at the shut down and it refutes the accusations of doxxing. x.com/gideonzhi/status/1819215914988196204
Seems like the discord community was helping make the site more resilient since it would often go down and stay down for days because only one person could bring it back up and no one could contact him. They also were going to reduce the costs by a lot and foot the bill. Seems like this was shut down by an overzealous ruler not anything else.
Sorry its a xitter link but its the only place theyve posted.
ShaturThanks for the info!
Here is the link for people who don’t use X: xcancel.com/gideonzhi/status/1819215914988196204
There’s still gamehacking.org. I still go there from time to time. I’ve even submitted a few hacks myself.