... Their fucking YouTube account is gone too.
You Thanos-snapped him.
It's always a bit disheartening when things like that happen and things get near-effectively erased aside from people's personal offline copies.
So... just some general thoughts about the history of things like this in the FFVII Fan space:
It's especially tough as a big part of TLS was a very focused & concentrated effort galvanized to
prevent losing so many of the collective work efforts of the people involved with ACF back in the day around news, translation, & information essentially being stuck under the constraint of someone who vanished them because they technically had the authority to do so. Even ACF had most people with that mindset because we were tip-toeing around looking good enough to feel like the center for information, but not TOO close to official to get vanished with a Cease & Desist which was not uncommon in those days for fan sites before every company just had a generic set of official social media pages.
Especially as I started out doing news scanslations & then article writing on ACF, even when the forums got axed I retained separate account access to news post to the main site. When
Crisis Core was coming up, and I made the hail mary "Anyone who sees this, come to FFOF and let's make a new version of this site" post when I knew it had the biggest possible audience of likely eyes on it, it was still tough to do because I knew that there was a non-zero possibility that not just THAT one post might get removed when my account inevitably got deleted (which it did within just a couple of days and luckily the other old articles remained until the site went down). It was still nerve-wracking because I didn't want to all of that historical information of the translations and others posts I'd made to get suddenly vanished from the Internet aside from my own personal copies of the various .PSD and other working files I still had on my local hard drive (which unfortunately died to hardware failure a couple years later).
Regardless of the tumultuous personal histories that any of us have had with any number of other heavily contributing members of the community who've come and gone, it's generally always been in a context of us prioritizing that the things we've done while a part of the community here are the sort of thing that exists
for everyone, despite where various majority efforts came from on any particular project. They're probably important to people online we've never met before and might never even talk to.
I actually ran into that sort of thing two years ago as this one particular site that had an absolutely IMMENSE database of Japanese Buddhist bonji script that I'd been referencing and researching on for several months just went offline suddenly one day, and
literally the only snapshots of parts of it on the Wayback Machine are from when I was accessing it in 2021. I can only assume that it was one of those things that someone had tossed together years ago and largely forgotten about it, and then suddenly getting server costs thanks to someone in Sweden pouring over tons of pages all the time was just an expense that they couldn't cover. I'll probably never know for sure, nor will I have any way of getting back to any of that data which, insofar as I can tell, doesn't have another resource for that is even REMOTELY equivalent to what that site was.
(EDIT: I hadn't checked for it recently as I haven't been back researching down that particular rabbit hole since it went offline, but it looks like
they relocated the page over to a new location in March of 2022 as it had to be suddenly migrated without warning in mid-2021).
It's why I take so many exhaustive notes and also write articles in the first place, because half the time, they're weird niche interests that I know only a few people will want to know about, but those people have a deep & genuine interest in that topic... and I'm often one of those people, so I always have a hard time imagining intentionally removing something like this, but especially after stumbling across this quote about life just a couple hours ago.
X ![Neo :neo: :neo:](/forums/images/smilies/neo.gif)