Update: The Discord staff/community deny the doxxing allegations, with Snarf posting this response.

Wow, it’s the end of an era.

Indeed, after nearly 20 years online, the owner of ROMhacking.net has finally called it quits and shut down submissions for the site.

Here’s the message they shared earlier:

It’s been a good near 20 year run, but for various reasons it’s time to wind things down. The site achieved almost everything it set out to do, and far exceeded it. We joined hacking and translation communities together for the first time ever. We outlasted and eclipsed ROM hacking sites that came before us. We brought ROM hacking from niche and fragmented to global and centralized. We assembled the largest force of ROM hackers on the planet. We brought learning resources and accessibility to a much wider range of people. We made major progress legitimizing and pulling ROM hacking from underground dark web type material to something much more accepted by the mainstream. We paved a much easier path for all of those that will come after us. No doubt, this site changed ROM hacking forever. It will leave behind the legacy of those accomplishments to remember.

Things sure have changed since the beginning days. I miss the times when I was able to interact with a smaller group of supportive people to collaborate with rather than the entire world. Having gone from an unknown fledgling site to an infinitely growing and globally known one made sustainability very challenging. The site became so busy with 24/7 use, endless queues, and an endless inbox. It’s a very different world than it was in 2005. Copyright pressures increased dramatically with takedowns and legal burden. The site shifted from serving mostly contributing humans to bots and overzealous people abusing resources. They drowned everybody else out. The need for the site has lessened over time. There are now many options for community discussions, open source projects, and file storage across the Internet. For a while, I was looking to find a successor within the circles of site supporters. I asked several potential people, but the stars did not align.

I was finally looking to wind things down at the end of last year. I wanted to provide the site database and file archive to the general public. At that time, an internal group suddenly emerged with an offer to help continue the site. I questioned their intentions, but I thought it could prove to be a more community friendly path forward. However, it turned out to be the opposite. We had a rocky phase 1, moving the downloads into their possession. When I went to startup phase 2, I discovered a most dishonest and hate filled group. I learned that I had been dehumanized for a very long time. My personal details had been given out. Secret deceitful plots had been made to cut me out, and drop a bomb like I am a target to destroy. My family has seen this and after discussion, we are immediately ceasing all related site operations. We are cutting ties to Discord and Twitter social media outlets, and will have no further contact with these individuals. Lines were crossed. I had hoped this community especially would have learned from what happened to Near. This behavior is not OK for handling disagreements, miscommunication, anger, or anything else.

As you can see, it’s for personal reasons rather than business or legal ones. There are no cease-and-desist letters or copyright takedowns. No cybersecurity incidents cause data to go missing. No political issues making the site’s continued existence untenable…

Instead, it’s due to the messed-up actions of certain members of the community and the drama unfolding between the owner and their Discord moderation team.

And after a while, all that drama gets to you. After years of disagreements between members on how the site should be run, and competitors trying to attack your site in every way under the sun, it’s no surprise that Nightcrawler wanted to do something less stressful instead.

But it’s a huge loss nonetheless. ROM Hacking.net was the place for ROM hacks all these years. The place where every translation project under the sun took place, and the one where you could find mods for hundreds or thousands of games, not just the two or three most popular ones.

So, to just see it end like this is unreal. It’s like a major part of the original internet is just gone for good, with its community scattered across the winds.

Still, at least video game preservation won’t suffer too badly here. All the site’s submissions have now been backed up to the Internet Archive, and the database is at least accessible in a read-only format for the foreseeable future. So, while new submissions are unavailable, at least we don’t have to see two decades of history wiped out in an instant.

Either way, thanks for all your hard work Nightcrawler, and we wish you well for your future projects. We’re grateful you provided a hub for the modding community for all these years, and that even when things were at their most dire, you put the community first and preserved everyone’s work going forward.

Here’s hoping the next community owner manages to do just as good of a job with their own ROM hack database.

Source:

Site: ROMhacking.net Moves to News Only, Database and File Archive Released to Internet Archive