Bigot Brigade Something Awful and Friends - The roller-coaster train-wreck embarrassing downfall of a Web 1.0 giant and its tick offspring like from Cloverfield

Secret Asshole said:
It might be an excuse to drag it out. If he did the more obvious solution (freeze and archive the forums, just do user data) people would be wondering why it wasn't done already. Saying he wants to move it all over with that fucking monstrosity of a code base gives him more time to beg for money or just not do it. Or just get more money, move just the user shit over, pocket the excess and say 'whoops, didn't have enough'. It makes no sense to transfer that abortion over.

Though the more likely answer is that he's fucking stupid.
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Here's the thing. Archives barely works right with the normal site as it is. So "doing it right" doesn't make any sense because the forums barely work as it is. God forbid you want to do something outside of the box like "search the forums" or "look at posts from >2 years ago"

So really there isn't much excuse for Lowtax not to just freeze the archives and leave them as is, while migrating over to a new platform for current posting. If archives were integrated into the main SA forums as one huge entity, then that'd be one thing, but they're very very much not.
 
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NeoGAF Lurker said:
What are the odds that Lowtax is whining about how expensive it is because he hopes that he can rope in some goon who will beg to do it for free or for peanuts.

Like in his Ambien-hazed mind, he is expecting some goon to say "For $30,000? Gee I bet I could do it for some CITY NAME SPORTS TEAM t-shirts!" Then he takes another swig of Barefoot wine and then passes out.
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He just got swindled by someone that claimed they could do everything for cheap and in 3 months. I think he might be serious this time since he's supposedly been contacting real companies to get estimates.
 
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A Random said:
Dumb question, @proteus4994 , but what's your opinion on the whole 'Negrotown' situation?
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After LF went off the rails (by which I mean damn near took down the entire forums), I stay far far away from D&D and its subforums, but much like everything D&D has ever spawned, it's terrible.

Edit:
jace821 said:
He just got swindled by someone that claimed they could do everything for cheap and in 3 months. I think he might be serious this time since he's supposedly been contacting real companies to get estimates.
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I believe he might be serious too, but that doesn't mean it's gonna happen. iirc he did a fundraiser a while back to fix the forums but I learned years ago to ignore red stickies so I have no idea how it turned out.

NeoGAF Lurker said:
Then he takes another swig of Barefoot wine and then passes out.
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lol Barefoot? I thought it was common knowledge that Lowtax drank box wine. Barefoot is, like, special occasion wine.

Edit 2: To be clear, I don't dislike Lowtax, the dude made forums that gave me a LOT of entertainment and for that I'll always be grateful to him. But ambien/box wine/mangosteen jokes will always be funny. Always.
 
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BlueSpark said:
He's probably just been asking random guys he knows, likely goons.
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Goons have been offering to work on the forum software for damn near 10 years for free or minimal reward. At one point, SH/SC offered to take it on as a group project. Lowtax always says no. Don't ask me why, I honestly have never been able to figure that out.
 
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proteus4994 said:
Goons have been offering to work on the forum software for damn near 10 years for free or minimal reward. At one point, SH/SC offered to take it on as a group project. Lowtax always says no. Don't ask me why, I honestly have never been able to figure that out.
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I strongly suspect that the reason is that he wants to keep how fucked-up the codebase and security of the site is a secret and he knows that the type of goon willing to work for hundreds of hours for free just for status on SA is the kind that would write a tell-all post for attention eventually.

Lowtax has always been very insistent that goons' financial details aren't stored by SA and that their system is secure, I wonder if that's true.
 
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BlueSpark said:
Lowtax has always been very insistent that goons' financial details aren't stored by SA and that their system is secure, I wonder if that's true.
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This is the one thing I believe him about, he's publicly lamented SA's inability to deal with certain problem users who constantly do chargebacks on buying new accounts and how much effort has to go into working out what the source of the chargeback even is, and that they're pretty much powerless to stop the purchases that will inevitably be charged back from occurring.

I don't doubt that some part of all of that is incompetence and bad coding getting in the way of what little detectivework needs to be done when a chargeback happens, but I also don't doubt that lowtax would implement a way to ban certain cards/cardholders if he could, and not holding on to even parts of people's financial details is a pretty big obstacle to preventing abuse so I do think he's honest about that.
 
BlueSpark said:
I strongly suspect that the reason is that he wants to keep how fucked-up the codebase and security of the site is a secret and he knows that the type of goon willing to work for hundreds of hours for free just for status on SA is the kind that would write a tell-all post for attention eventually.
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I agree with you and I think that's why Lowtax doesn't do it either. However, it doesn't really make much sense. It COULD be a security thing but I honestly don't think it is. SA has only been hacked....once or twice that I know of in the past 16 years, and those were due to vindictive mods/admins iirc. For all of SA's faults, I don't think it's any more insecure than any other forum. Also, anyone willing to work with the codebase wouldn't need access to the databases at all, so as long as anything secure is in a PW locked database, you should be fine. You might have to go through the code and scrub out user/pass for DB access and merge them back in later before deployment or whatever, but that's a small price to pay for free labor.

And as far as how fucked-up the codebase is, radium's incompetence has been a running joke for years, and usually it's usually Lowtax making those jokes. We all assume it's running on duct tape and bubble gum, so it'd be hard to really shock anyone in that department either.
 
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jace821 said:
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Lowtax actually had staff to lay off?
 
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proteus4994 said:
Here's the thing. Archives barely works right with the normal site as it is. So "doing it right" doesn't make any sense because the forums barely work as it is. God forbid you want to do something outside of the box like "search the forums" or "look at posts from >2 years ago"

So really there isn't much excuse for Lowtax not to just freeze the archives and leave them as is, while migrating over to a new platform for current posting. If archives were integrated into the main SA forums as one huge entity, then that'd be one thing, but they're very very much not.
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I shouldn't be surprised Archives doesn't work well at this point. It never worked and it took endless bitching to get in a right state. Does Search even work at all? I remember it being broken for not months, but years. (Also fucking lol at having to pay for the privilege to SEARCH A FORUM. A feature that never worked right or well in the first place that you paid for. And it is pretty much the most basic of basic of basic features. Fucking christ).

There really is no excuse, any rational person would just ditch the abomination for something clean.
 
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The stupidest thing lowtax has done, or rather the smartest thing he has not done, is to finally set up a merch store.

He could have done something like get fucking coasters and mugs and t-shirts with just the grenade logo on them and he would have made a huge amount of money, and given the abundance of artists and memes that have come and gone through the site he would have had a wealth of cool shit to slap on t-shirts.
 
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Sad Clown Shoe said:
The stupidest thing lowtax has done, or rather the smartest thing he has not done, is to finally set up a merch store.

He could have done something like get fucking coasters and mugs and t-shirts with just the grenade logo on them and he would have made a huge amount of money, and given the abundance of artists and memes that have come and gone through the site he would have had a wealth of cool shit to slap on t-shirts.
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He did that in the early days but his laziness and incompetence caused him to stop. I bought an SA shirt like 15 years ago and they sent the wrong size. I tried contacting them to get a replacement but never got a reply so I just did a chargeback with my credit card company. Usually a chargeback will get a merchant's attention and you'll finally hear from them but I never did.
 
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Man, these people are really bitter their parents didn't pay for that master's in Native Storytelling in Feminist Structures. I get that sometimes you see mommy and daddy become sad but that has more to do with having goons as children than anything else. I'd know I'd consider becoming an addict if my children became voluntary incels with no interest in contributing to society.
 
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