nightcralwer updated his website
i am going to intermittently quote bits of it because some of these are whoppers. the most glaring one is at the bottom. well, they're all bad, but i mean.
This is just a minor follow-up. Many people have contacted me in regards to hosting or taking the site. ROMhacking.net runs on top of my web backend platform that other projects and clients use.
what. even on its face, this claim is absurd: why would you tie a website about modifications to illicit copies to anything "other clients" use. i do not believe this argument in the least.
for one: it is the year 2024. even on the most shit of shared hosting, you can have more than one database and "site". this is a place where hosting was more than $200/month (remember, no actual numbers came out, that's just what someone was paying). even if you're in a "i host multiple people on this server", ok great tar -zcvf
website.tar.gz /home/romhacking/public_html.
For obvious security reasons, this is not something that can be given away or taken. It contributes to my livelihood.
nightcralwler quite clearly has the knowledge and skill to sanitize the database — see also the incomplete database dump he released. see also the data crystal dump that he transferred -- that used to have forum integration for accounts (long-since broken). he's not dumb. he's playing dumb.
the "it contributes to my livelihood" part is the only part of this that makes sense, but even then, if this was so costly, why are you keeping it up if it's a net expense???
After what happened, I am no longer in a position to support any partnership options.
i give you scp credentials, you upload archive of files and database, the end. we already did this song and dance once with data crystal.
As previously mentioned, I’ve already provided the site database and files to the Internet Archive.
the database dump as released was missing a ton of things, including things like author names, credits, etc.. multiple people have been scraping rhdn to back up things like reviews and cover other missing attributions.
New efforts by others will be required. Anyone can pick things up and continue. What’s there is far more than I had when I started! I’m sure there are some innovators out there that can do the job!this is literally just "i burned down what i had, but hey, you can pick up the scraps and start over". thanks, pal. thanks for burning down the library.
What I can still do is redirect sectional links from RHDN to a new site. This would allow for the existing RHDN links all over the web to continue to be valid, and presumably allow editing to continue at their new location. I saw the promising ‘NeoRHDN’ project by NinCollin on the forum. They have the right idea with an upstanding approach. I look forward to seeing how it develops as a possible option.
nincollin's website. it is very new. remember that this bullshit hasn't even been going on for two weeks. or has it? fuck. march 3810th, 2020
As a continued courtesy, the site and downloads will remain online. News is open for project releases and updates. The forum is open for active ROM hacking projects.
rather notably, the (former) rhdn staff, including the person actually hosting the downloads for nightcrawler since january, told nightcrawler that august 20th, the s3 bucket serving all of his images/downloads would be turned off.
so... now he's hosting all the files, again. the downloads and images are all hosted by rhdn directly. why were people paying $200/m for nightcrawler, again?
in which case our timeline becomes:
- nightcrawler needs more money to keep rhdn going
- nightcrawler wants to try and find another host for rhdn
- someone takes download/image hosting off of him, to the tune of $200/month, for 8 months (jan-aug)
- nightcrawler decides he is not, after all, willing to transfer the site, and shuts it down. (Correction from a former staff member: "The timeline is actually more confusing. In February or January, NC said he was pausing the transfer saying that "funding was secured" and that we may talk about about creating a new site in the future.")
- former rhdn staff say "uhh ok we're not gonna keep hosting this, then."
- nightcrawler bans those former staff members and re-enables rhdn-local downloads
- nightcrawler somehow claims this is his livelihood now???? and also that the website is directly tied to other (unstated) clients???
i'm at a loss. is this absurd to anyone else? does anyone else smell burning toast? edit: i'm genuinely serious in this question because i don't think any of these facts are secret, but like. ??? ?????????
p.s. the cloudflare thing is so funny. say you wanna download the latest hack, right? trying to download it makes you go through a cloudflare browser challenge... it's about 250kB, total, maybe more depending on your particular configuration / if cloudflare makes you click pictures of traffic cones.
the actual file you download is 815 bytes.
