-<=F=>-
After nearly 20 years of service, Romhacking dot net will soon wind down services. The news comes as a shock to the community, which had relied on the site as a repository for the largest collection of hack and translation patches on the internet. It’s safe to say that a vast number of games across multiple platforms may not have seen a translation patch without it.
According to the news post, the site will shift to news, and will become read only, among other things like an end to their affiliation with Twitter and Discord, with the forum remaining up for the foreseeable future. All of the hacks and translations will now be found on the Internet Archive*.
*Fun fact: while the translation patches will mostly be searchable, most hacks don’t feature the name of the game they belong to in the filename, in my experience. Good luck finding what you were looking for, as this was also a problem on the actual site that was at least ameliorated by being able to search by game.
Notable in Nightcrawler’s post, however, are the two paragraphs in the middle, explaining why this is happening.
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.
The problem, however, is that this seems to be a misrepresentation of events, if the word of that mentioned group is anything to go by. Which it should, as one of its members is rather well known in the scene: Gideon Zhi of Aeon Genesis Translations and Time Capsule Games. At minimum, it’s safe to say that Live A Live‘s HD2D remake probably wouldn’t have gotten a translation if not for the buzz that Aeon Genesis’ patch of the SNES original generated over the past decade and a half.
Zhi’s not just some rando, his word has some weight. And he went over the assertions in Nightcrawler’s news post over on Xitter:
I will quote the bulk of the thread here, as it’s important:
By now you’ve probably seen that http://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… ever. Consequently it was costing its administrator hundreds of dollars/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.
By now you’ve probably seen that http://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… ever. Consequently it was costing its administrator hundreds of dollars/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 his 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 him.
So, yeah. Mourn for RHDN. But this was not the outcome anyone wanted, and Nightcrawler is *not* the victim here.In short: Nightcrawler existed as a singular point of failure for the site (if it went down, which it frequently did, the only hope was that he’d notice), resisted any unfamiliar changes, demanded several illogical concessions, and ultimately seems to have lied about doxxing attempts.
It’s an unusual conflagration for such a site to die in these days, but it was really common for a lot of old-time internet types to end everything in drama.
Regardless, godspeed, you miserable broken mess of a site. I hope whatever your successor is winds up being easier to use.
About Author
