XenForo has revoked our license

[Foxxo]

Good! I hate change.

 

[Fields Of Rye]

The year is 2070.

The carbonated, bubbly tang of the Cocacola(TM) says Black Lives Matter (R) Ocean prickles my nose as I follow the directions provided to me from the VCR tape, chucked into my trench during WW3.

I clench tight to my novelty oversized Walkman/VCR combo, as the smooth baritone voice of a man they once called Null directs my attention towards a building nearly buried beneath piles of booster shots that Florida refused to use after the release of Covid: Opposing Force and Covid: Blue Shift.

Inside the building is a single server. Dusty LEDs flick on and off and there's an audible rapid click from what I hope is only a fan catching and not anything worse. I sink to my knees and plug in walkman, opening the HTML reader and praying to god that it works on Windows (TM) Version TransRights(R)

The page opens

ELON MUSK HAS REVOKED OUR LICENSE FOR STARLINK...

I begin the great work. First comes the satellite dish. Next, an updated flash player. I install the font face Quattrocinco, painstakingly remade by hand. All as the one they call Null dictated. All to bring the server back online.

Finally, it's time. The server spins to life. My mouth goes dry as my Walkman is redirected to Cloudflare, then the page loads, slowly, as though it was connected to a pirate satellite network composed entirely of pizza boxes and obscure soviet sodas.

My thoughts go back to what it took to get here. What information could have been so important that it was hidden, far beneath the Apartment Condos of MegaCalifornia? Whose mere suspicion of my knowledge had sent three diversity squadrons to my door step? Whose creator has been on the FBI says "Diddling kids is A OK as long as your gay"(R) most wanted list for decades? Who every MegaBank has forbidden from using services?

....

....

Huh.

Man

How is that Tooter guy still alive that's wild.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

So Vordrak has gotten Xenforo to drop support for the Farms, but Null has more or less planned for this event.

Obviously, Null is just in damage control mode:

KiwiFarms’ XenForo License Revoked | Matthew Hopkins – The Witchfinde…

archived 1 Dec 2021 21:43:48 UTC

archive.md

If, as the email implies, it was revoked before my inquiry then perhaps that motivated Moon’s posts about creating an alternative. He has good reason to be less than forthcoming with his users because anything which worsens security is likely to concern them and make them consider rival sites.

 

[Synthwave Obsessed]

Isn't this considered some manner of breach of contract with the enduser? What justification did the XenForo PTB cook up to revoke Null's license? Just because ONE individual complained about <something> about the site? If this license revocation sticks, isn't Null due a refund? WTF?

Not usually. License agreements normally have a "we can terminate continued support at any time" baked into the contract. Some will be more lenient and have a 30 day notice, but it depends on the software you're licensing. XenForo is software that could receive security updates at any time, so I'm guessing a no notice termination is to prevent cases of "wtf you gave me a 30 day notice but you released a security patch the day after reeeeeeee!"

It is shitty, but it is what it is.

My advice--fork the codebase you have. It's solid enough. Do not waste your time trying to rebuild Xenforo in Rust, that will NEVER work out. NEVER. You can be a platform developer or a platform, but not both. You will get so bogged down into the nitty gritty that you will lose sight of what you are doing. My understanding is that your license covers your current usage of the product, so just move on.

I'm concerned about how security will be handled in the future. Even though most troons lack the skill to hack a website themselves (though there are some noteworthy examples we have threads on) it is clear they have no qualms about hiring DDoS services. I don't know what Null's policy on security will be, but it will be important to the website because the users are... well targeted for exercising free speech.

I don't think it's a "doomsday" level event though. Null has repeatedly said you should practice safe security practices and use a VPN, fresh email, and a username/password that doesn't repeat with your normal persona.

 

[Pissmaster]

Go check out some phpBB forums and then think how that would work out for a multimedia heavy site like KF.
Null doing nothing is better then going to phpBB.

phpBB • Community Home

www.phpbb.com

I'm shocked phpBB is still getting updates, latest version was released in October '21

I haven't seen an active phpBB forum in over a decade, and every time I find one it's just dominated by SEO bots

 

[George Lucas]

Have you considered using proboards

 

[Spaghetti Policy]

I guess things are going pretty shitty in Vordrak’s life. Healthy people tend to focus on themselves when there life isn’t going well. Unhealthy people focus on other people.

Vordrak has a shitty life, lol. What a massive faggot.

 

[Terrifik]

war war never changes

 

[TheBallPit]

He might be due (or have) a refund but every user agreement says they can yoink the service. And even if they don't explicitly, they always can. Believe it or not one of the primary tenets of contract law is "no slavery" so you never actually have to keep providing a service; refunds are basically the limit of it.

But the cornerstone of contract law is so that Person A can't wake-up one day and arbitrarily screw over Person B with some BS "explanation", otherwise it's a bad faith contract. Admittedly, I don't know the ins and outs of Null's XenForo contract, so I don't know what sort of money changed hands and what kind of support is stated and expected as part of that payment, but on the surface this seems like something that could be legally contested.

 

[A Traveler]

So Vordrak's off to have a victory wank on minorly annoying us. Honestly when the site finally goes down, Null will release the torrent of the site and, I'm gonna do what those journo's did a few years ago. Build a massive, beautiful library in Minecraft and fill the books it with as many threads as humanly possible. Then post it for the world to see it'll be great.

 

[Sexy Senior Citizen]

I guess things are going pretty shitty in Vordrak’s life. Healthy people tend to focus on themselves when there life isn’t going well. Unhealthy people focus on other people.

Vordrak has a shitty life, lol. What a massive faggot.

Vordrak has no life. He has no job, no girlfriend, no family. He spends his days picking fights on the internet because he's a pathetic faggot.

 

[Sangria]

It sucks real hard some nutjob can complain about us hard enough to get people to cave. At least in this case, losing the software license doesn't seem like that big of a blow.

Yeah from what I understand seems like this is more of a win-win for both KF and Xenforo. KF gets better forum software and Xenforo doesn't have to deal with the sheer volume of media the farms produce.

 

[Norvic]

Imagine in this world where nobody hosts their own sites, just uses proprietary crap like discord, that you'd fuck yourself out of a paying customer just because they're sometimes mean to trannies.

Some people don't know which side their bread is buttered on. Troons are never going to be your customers, they have no money.

 

[Gimmick Account]

But the cornerstone of contract law is so that Person A can't wake-up on day and arbitrarily screw over Person B with some BS "explanation", otherwise it's a bad faith contract. Admittedly, I don't know the ins and outs of Null's XenForo contract, so I don't know what sort of money changed hands and what kind of support is stated and expected as part of that payment, but on the surface this seems like something that could be legally contested.

No a bad faith contract refers to something else. You're just describing a regular breach. Arbitration for contracts is basically limited to making you financially whole or sometimes ordering specific performance, except that can almost never include making you do shit.

Edit: that's a bit confusing so to elaborate that usually means turning over ownership (if it's something nonfungible). For everything else it's easier to just make you pay.
Edit2: also I realised Americans don't usually say arbitration for resolution in court but I'm not being that specific, don't @ me

 

[John Furrman]

Good luck with the new platform. Are you gonna make it open source?

 

[HumanHive]

Obviously, Null is just in damage control mode:

KiwiFarms’ XenForo License Revoked | Matthew Hopkins – The Witchfinde…

archived 1 Dec 2021 21:43:48 UTC

archive.md

What rival sites?

 

[Turbocuck]

The official line seems to be a lack of "communication" with the dev team, but reading between the lines makes me think they didn't receive the unchecked petty authority that all jannies inherently crave, so they got mad and left.

Reading further, the core team may actually be the problem. This is a list of complaints about Ashley Williams from when she was part of node.js. She's now on the Rust Core team.

https://archive.md/VEtHu

If you don't feel like reading that, basically she continuously brags about antagonizing white men. You know, by far the largest group using compiled languages.

 

[TheBallPit]

Not usually. License agreements normally have a "we can terminate continued support at any time" baked into the contract. Some will be more lenient and have a 30 day notice, but it depends on the software you're licensing. XenForo is software that could receive security updates at any time, so I'm guessing a no notice termination is to prevent cases of "wtf you gave me a 30 day notice but you released a security patch the day after reeeeeeee!"

It is shitty, but it is what it is.

No a bad faith contract refers to something else. You're just describing a regular breach. Arbitration for contracts is basically limited to making you financially whole or sometimes ordering specific performance, except that can almost never include making you do shit.

Hrrrr. Still seems incredibly skeevy. Can Microsoft terminate your Windows license because you bad-mouthed Bill Gates last week on Twitter? If the answer is "yes", then something is VERY wrong with contract law (IMO, anyway).

 

[Account]

We're making our own shit that's feature compatible with XenForo and will be free. I don't need suggestions.

Will it be open source (AGPL, etc)?
If so, do you plan to host it on the kiwi farms git and accept pull requests? (I don't know Rust so I can't help, but just curious)

 

[Fred Fuckstone]

the only thing missing is AeroGlass bugging out and flashing it's url 20 times a second on top of it all

to think KF would outgrow Xenforo before Something Awful ever switched to it