Gwen

Dumbass in a dumb land

  • She/Her

I was born in the late Holocene and I've seen some shit



gideonzhi
@gideonzhi

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.


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in reply to @gideonzhi's post:

Lol, I saw the RHDO guy on twitter loudly replying to every comment about RHDN with his own site in a... specific jokey way that immediately triggered every red flag imaginable. I knew nothing about it and immediately smelled something burning

From what I can tell:

  • RHDN will continue to exist as news-only
  • The files will be uploaded to archive.org
  • There's no viable successor at the moment

But beyond that? All I really know is what happened, not what the plan for the future is. I've been super burnt-out myself and, outside of trying and failing to convince Nightcrawler to divest to interested parties, have largely been just an incredibly frustrated bystander.

i've said this in a few places, but to say it here for other commentators/readers: datacrystal was something nightcrawler hosted with rhdn, and he wanted to stop hosting that; we worked it out and i was able to set it up and get it hosted.

i've reached out to him about doing this with rhdn as well; it's been six months and dc is doing great, so hopefully this can be a good path forward. we'll see.

If I parsed the homophobic and obliquely transphobic comments there right, the whole thing started over some GamerGate-type getting egged on to DOS the site in response to people posting "low-effort" hacks like changing Zelda games to use gender neutral language?

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.

is there a reason it cost so much? judging from what was posted on archive.org, it's only around 13 GB of data, so looking at amazon S3 pricing, the storage itself should've only been around $0.28/mo. you're also charged for the number of requests, but it's hard to imagine there'd be enough to get it to $200/mo... am i missing something?

the costs involved are something neither i nor anyone else who has experience in this sect can understand from an outside perspective. the numbers i did hear were wildly out of the range of "plausible costs for a site of this size"

my source is that i run tcrf.net and it costs me less than $200 total for the hosting/mo

the main cost for S3 are the transfer costs to the internet. if you're looking at the s3 pricing, they put it in another tab. you can upload whatever you want and the storage is cheap, but if people download the data it's 10 cents per gb. you'd only need to transfer out 2tb to get to 200 dollars a month. i can see 2tb realistically being downloaded across all users in a month