I've spent a significant chunk of my work day looking through wayback machine's archive (my job is hard, I tell ya)... I think both ACF and TLS have benefited from their overall base getting older/maturing, on average.TLS has a history of drama too, not as extreme but pretty up there; it's still here if you know where to look
Yeah, I've been trawling through it. While I typically avoid ED like the edgelord plague it is, the summary of major events is the only real info I've found, and it's been helpful...outside of the overtly racist/homophobic/etc shit they always pepper throughout their entriesACF seemed to be divided into three camps. It actually had four formal (as in, separate private sub forums) groups and each one had their own culture. There was serious friction between two of them that erupted in an e-war lol. One side was the Renegades of Apocalypse and the other was Somewhat Obsessed. I’m about to make some sweeping generalizations that obviously don’t apply to everyone. RoA was largely a group with a large portion of mods and the asskissers thereof. The culture therein was prim and holier than thou, and included the admin, who was a severely delusional woman who believed she was Sephiroth’s exclusive lover. SO had a trashy 3edgy5me 4Chan culture. The third category were the Fated Children and Crystal Inc members who were generally more laid back and didn’t really like to start shit. Eventually SO seeped into FC and RoA seeped into CI and the civil war just got so out of hand that I can’t even remember exactly what happened.
What a time lol.
Actually, I wonder if the ED article is still up.
Oh dear god it is.
Last I checked the archive, there were thankfully no recorded posts of mine.Nothing quite like going back and reading shit you posted forever ago.
oh the sweet, sweet cringe
Reading through some of it, "fun" isn't the word I would use to describe that hot messMan I missed all the fun stuff
So I guess the collapse of AC.net is what lead to the rise of TLS.net?
That is absolutely correct.
Summoner Yuna pulled the plug on the forum after an egregiously dramatic stupid decision which resulted in mass bannings and crap. Yop, myself and others basically ripped as much of the data and all we had provided them to restart a new forum and site unattached to the toxic drama that was unfortunately connected to that forum.
From there, AC.net stayed where it belonged.
In our memories.
Shodan!!!!!I haven't finished the FFVII remake yet
Anyway IIRC we didn't rip content off of AC.net, we got the original authors (like Pixel, Hito, X, Tres, I'm sure I'm missing a lot) on board because they wanted a space to post their stuff.
I got banned for trying to back up the forums though; the forums went dark while the staff reorganized, but I was on staff as well and still had access. Pulled a tool I hacked together - should see if I still have it somewhere - to move FFOF's poasts off of InvisionFree into vB and converted it to work with vB. Off course they found out after a while and booted me, but it was a good attempt - I did it for conservation, because there was a lot of good shit on there.
And that's why I'm personally not a big fan of the amount of activity on Discord, because it's so fleeting, whereas forum posts are forever. That can be a bad thing as well btw
Anyway she should've sold it. I think it was Gabe who even offered to buy it back when? It would've remained in the hands of people that knew the site and its people, instead of a scalper who buys shit, pumps up the views / ad revenue and sells it off again for money. Instead, new admins were sourced from outside because ??? and things kinda went downhill even more from there.
anyway I was doing me a curious; the domain name is now managed by https://www.cscglobal.com/, "world's leading provider of business, legal, tax, and digital brand services to companies around the globe"; I suspect it's just a holding company for a marketing bureau or something. No registrar data (like owner) available. The IP address points to Bangkok, Thailand for some reason.
I suspect the change happened in 2018, but that's based on internet archive which doesn't have a good archive of the thing in 2018, but while it was loading the page title changed to NetSurveillance something, which implies it was pointing to someone's IP camera. No clue what the deal with that is, might just be whoever owns it had it pointing at a random IP address. I could look up the exact WHOIS history but those are apparently paid services, so never mind.