What happened to this place? I usually just try to catch up on the threads I’ve been following like the never not funny pic thread. Today I went to see what was new and the OG is a ghost town.
I’ve been here for over 20 years and it’s never been so dead. Anyone able to tell me what happened?
Here for answers?
The new owners nuked the old threads going 10+ years for google ad revenue.
Everyone left after that to another site which is exactly like this without the fa66ot mods and new censorship.
MTOGGA
Make The OG Great Again
You all are going to want to check out TheOnlyGround.com that seems to be where everyone has moved to
There’s also,
Nitecrawler, altofsky and everyone else is at the only ground now.
cool, and thanks for sharing the new site, wondered where everyone went…
Thanks. I just signed up at the Only Ground. I’ll check out the other one too
It’s much like here. Layout is very similar.
Shit - they wuped my Did the Orcs Kill Kennedy ? thread…
Damn thatbis oldwr than my kids…
Cheers. Thanks for the heads up.
They’re all playing that shitty new MMO expansion pack where you collect gay horses to ride.
Fucking bastards!!! RIP epic thread
Im there too!!!
Short story: Last year, Kirik announced he’d sold the site. The new owner checked in here briefly, then disappeared. Last month, a single previously unknown individual with admin powers spent a few days messing with the moderation tools without warning or explanation, banning most of the daily active users and mods in the process, which alienated most everybody else watching it happen. (See note below.) This was followed by automated filtering of a poorly-conceived list of politically incorrect terms, automated deletion of old threads containing such terms, and publishing of forgotten, self-submitted user profile data that publicly identified many users who presumably would much prefer to have remained anonymous. Some of these actions have since been reversed, but not mitigated.
Multiple end users then linked their “backup” forums, two of which absorbed the bulk of ex-pats. Monthly lurkers are now wandering in to threads like these one at a time. The rest of us are mostly waiting for the lights to go out.
NOTE: To my eye, this was not an organized effort; it was one person playing with automated tools. The initial bannings were all from a single thread where a lot of users and all the mods were throwing around a single politically incorrect slur for LGBTQ - otherwise used to describe a bundle of firewood - without regard to the individual contexts they were using it.
Longer story: Kirik never intended this to be what it was nor what it became. It fell into his lap as a result of trying to sell a book; nothing more. It appears to have been a constant headache for him, and (again to my eye) one that he’d more or less abandoned about a decade ago.
He was given Covid-19 PPP money, which he then used in a last ditch effort to modernize the site and its forums. This was not well-received by this forum’s most notorious loud-mouthed Karens, and did nothing to stop the loss of posters to other forums/social media.
The new ownership appears to be primarily interested in the utility of a recognizable URL towards their martial arts-related business endeavors, and would understandably see much of this forum as a liability. There is speculation that the only reason they haven’t axed it entirely yet is because there may be some value in the membership/user data to attract investors, and that there additionally may be some deliberate misrepresentation in that area. I personally haven’t seen enough evidence to support that, though, and don’t buy into it.
In my opinion, much of the anger around all of this is misplaced; it was fairly obvious this was the path once a corporate entity was involved. It was also self-evident (at least to me, anyway) that it would end in tears once Kirik gave up on moderation a decade ago and a small handful of users started chasing off anyone worth a shit.
