That's good. I forgot- Who is paying for the site now?
This site also hosts my old webcomic (which hosts The Adventures of Jimmy) so I just made it double as RuneVillage hosting. I don't intend to drop either one for as long as I live.
Statistics: Posted by Saten Ruiko — October 13th, 2021, 7:00 pm
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Is everything still okay regarding paying for the site to stay up?
Statistics: Posted by Saten Ruiko — October 10th, 2021, 4:37 pm
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Jaron - thank you for your continued efforts to keep this place alive. I may only pop in here every few months but every time I do I am greeted with great memories.
This community was a huge influence in my life when I was growing up and I will always be grateful for that.
Statistics: Posted by Shando — March 23rd, 2021, 5:30 am
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Phat Hobo wrote:
Some of you may be aware of this already, but a former Rver named Sah made a Youtube video about Hiker and Runevillage. I believe Sah was the one who brought light to the situation surrounding Hiker and his past?
In case anyone is interested, I've included a link below:
Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QSw5RjgZ50
-Phat
In case anyone is interested, I've included a link below:
Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QSw5RjgZ50
-Phat
This video is kinda chilling. He has absolutely no remorse for what he did and it almost seems like he got some sort of satisfaction from 'winning' the fight with Hiker. I don't know what relationship they had but I'm pretty sure this man is a sociopath and extremely challenged (or at least was) because his body language and just how calm and calculated he seems, and basking in having a YouTube channel all about him and how he's doing something super amazing and everybody should be grateful, really rings alarm bells. Considering what he helped to destroy and then he responds with a video that essentially demands he get praise and recognition for it despite the way he went about doing it.
Yes that is definitely Sah you're talking about.
Man, I used to care so much about becoming a Mod on this site, it's kind of funny reading these latest exchanges.
Just to add a few things from memory to what Applequest said - I don't think it was ever really mentioned here how hiker died, just that he did. I believe his lesser offence that was referenced to was that he was living with another convicted pedophile.
Also, didn't Mustangnut and Zilla meet hiker in person?
Statistics: Posted by Muscular Ape — March 22nd, 2021, 4:21 am
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Some of you may be aware of this already, but a former Rver named Sah made a Youtube video about Hiker and Runevillage. I believe Sah was the one who brought light to the situation surrounding Hiker and his past?
In case anyone is interested, I've included a link below:
Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QSw5RjgZ50
-Phat
This video is kinda chilling. He has absolutely no remorse for what he did and it almost seems like he got some sort of satisfaction from 'winning' the fight with Hiker. I don't know what relationship they had but I'm pretty sure this man is a sociopath and extremely challenged (or at least was) because his body language and just how calm and calculated he seems, and basking in having a YouTube channel all about him and how he's doing something super amazing and everybody should be grateful, really rings alarm bells. Considering what he helped to destroy and then he responds with a video that essentially demands he get praise and recognition for it despite the way he went about doing it.
You wouldn't go those lengths to get YOURSELF out there for something like this. Shows it was really personal and for what? Who was Sah anyway? What sort of role did he have in RV? Was there an actual deeper relationship there or was he just someone seeking to destroy something for his own satisfaction and ended up on RV and exploited the situation to his benefit? It's really pathetic how obviously invested he was in bringing Hiker down. Did he know him personally? Was there more going on? Or like I said, was he just a strange lonely and potentially challenged individual who wanted to cause misery?
Statistics: Posted by Sirangetta — March 4th, 2021, 9:18 am
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In case anyone is interested, I've included a link below:
Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QSw5RjgZ50
-Phat
Statistics: Posted by Phat Hobo — March 4th, 2021, 8:24 am
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That's a lot of questions. It's been awhile so I have forgotten some of this, and I don't think all of the details are appropriate to share. But I think we are all old enough now and enough time has passed to deserve to understand what happened, and it is such a small and devoted audience who would read this at this point anyway.
Hiker was an old guy, in his 60s. He was a convicted pedophile from back in the 80s. Then in the 90s he got in trouble with distributing child porn online. He ended up back in jail for a long stretch in the 00's near the tail end of RV's prime. We didn't know it at the time, it was just oh hiker disappeared (and good luck running things without any authority while I'm gone Apple
). I can't remember what landed him back in jail but I believe it was something more benign, like breaking parole, and he was back within a year. Eventually, somebody put the pieces together, which were all public record, that the leader of RV has this troubling past. When that went public Jagex smartly cut ties with us immediately and things here began falling apart. I believe hiker gave up the site, I can't remember who he gave admin rights to. But it was too late, the damage was done, and the already slow decline we were on sped up. A few years later somebody posted information that he had died, I can't remember the cause.There is no doubt Hiker was way out of line to create this site given his past. He was only a few years out of prison for child porn distribution when he started RV. I also believe he was using the donations to pay for legal fees or support himself. I think he was bringing in way more than it could've been costing to host the site. It's pretty fair to say he was a bad guy in a lot of ways. If you are looking for redeemable qualities, I think he did care about the community here in general, and in the growth of people specifically. He was very difficult to work with in trying to manage the site, but not because he didn't care or try. For example, when he modded like 80 people at the same time, including a number of people who had no business being mods. I believe he did that because he cared about trying to give all those people the opportunity to grow. Ridiculously stupid decision for the site, but coming from a good place. It's hard to reconcile this against his past. It puts a dark sheen over what should have been a good story. For example, there was a relatively prominent RVer who lived like less than an hour from Hiker who was a kid. Nothing ever happened thankfully, but given slightly different circumstances, could it have? It just falls back to just how wildly inappropriate it was for Hiker to put himself in a position of extreme authority and admiration over a bunch of kids. I'm just thankful nobody was taken advantage of, to my knowledge - that would have been very difficult to stomach.
Oh and Henner also left the site in disgrace. I believe it is because he stole from us but I can't remember 100%. Ancient history at this point. Some pair of leaders we had.
Wow, it's a pretty deep backstory. Thanks for taking the time to sharing your knowledge on the subject. It's helping me to understand more about RV in the context of the dark side of this place that perhaps gets overshadowed by nostalgia and childhood memories.
It's concerning (or was) because you have what would be a paedophile's dream in creating an ideal environment to groom children. Why go to a school or a park when you can make the school or park come to you? What he managed to pull off is something that even the most intelligent and savvy predators out there would only aspire to recreate for themselves. And that is a considerable risk factor but speaks volumes about his capacity as a sex offender/predator to fulfil his desires. I'm not a criminologist and I haven't studied sex offenders or the behaviour behind it but it doesn't take much common sense to see the severity of the situation given it's context. If anything it's a big f**k you to the system and an even bigger boost to your ego knowing whatever the outcome you've got what you wanted. And considering your mentioning of his unwillingness to compromise with unreasonable changes he made to RV (like the spam modding loads of people and the using of donations to fund his own life outside of RV and his continuous poor and risky decisions) it speaks volumes about his character, potentially. Seems pretty unstable to me, perhaps even dysfunctional and with his history you have a recipe for disaster. And because he never disclosed any information it makes it even worse because he lived a double life and it's difficult (and perhaps we will never know) whether that double life was intentional and a calculated attempt at fulfilling his tendencies while coming across as a role model to kids.
It makes me think of the motives behind his ambitions to create RV. He seems pretty sly and cunning. I'm torn between the motives being legitimately concerning and a social experiment of sorts to sooth his already complex and potentially fragile sense of self and help sooth his tendencies, and of the motives being legitimately benevolent. It could go in either direction and either direction is plausible. I think at some time he wanted to get his kicks and he perhaps wasn't even aware of how successful his plan would become. It must have felt good to him knowing he had created this paradise that his paedophilic tendencies could rejoice in and his behaviour could go largely unchecked. At the same time he was in trouble with the law (several times by the looks of it) and all to do with his past. When he was found it's reported that he was found with another well known sex offender at the time of his arrest and this was noted in the court documents apparently and so by no means was he a changed man. That is if you want to determine change by the company he kept and their connections to his dark past. The other side it could genuinely be of a desire to change his life and good things. Creating a community like RV is a really good thing and it brought tens of thousands of people together with nearly 500 in the same place at one time (according to the most users online at the bottom of the board). 500 people in one place is a really good achievement and considering this was 2007, that's a success story.
Thinking about it now, Jagex were right to take action. There were probably the only ones at the time with a capacity to really hit RV where it hurt. They had enough authority and influence (obviously being the creators of the game RV was created around) to derail the train and that was probably for the best. Nobody or nothing else could have done it with such effectiveness (critical hit!) as they could. What is shocking despite this is how the authorities were not aware of his activities. I guess we're talking about a different world whereby the laws were different and not as rigorous as they are today. Oversight is a typical problem in the supervision of offenders and it's sadly part of the process. You can't let people free into society who have committed crimes and for them to be free in the truest form unless you allow them that freedom. Still it's pretty concerning that he managed to run a community full of unaware children for such a long time and nobody thought to question it or even prevent it from happening. The sort of protocol are now in place for oversight and stricter requirements thankfully to help mitigate those risks. I'm guessing at this time those laws were not fully in effect or even a thing.
I just hope nobody was harmed in the process.
I'm sure someone came forward about apparently being sexually attacked by Hiker? You can't take all the stories about Hiker and RV seriously though seeing as lots of it was conjecture and only a few people seemed to have actually bothered to do their research. If it was true then it's sickening and he was still an active sex offender during the reign of RV.
On a side note, the community still existed regardless of what Hiker's motives were and people still utilised the potential a community like RV had to offer and that counts for something. The fact that he was a paedophile doesn't change anything for me. It doesn't automatically infer I like paedophiles or I agree with their predatory behaviour. All of us were disconnected from who Hiker was and what his past was about. We had no idea. We can't be blamed nor should we foot the responsibility for that. We owe him nothing in that regard and yet recognition of what he created and what it meant to our childhoods (most of us who were children back then) should be accepted. RuneVillage and Hiker are two different things. RuneVillage is what people signed up for, not for the sexual offenses Hiker had committed nor in awareness of his story. Without this man RV would not have existed and we wouldn't be posting on this board right now. There wouldn't have been the same memories attached to the lives we all lived back then. He might have been a dark character but what he created and what it symbolizes is the important part. The idea, the concept of RV is what is important, at least to me anyway.
Saten Ruiko wrote:
Jackstick wrote:
Quote:
Coded by: Frank
Ugh, no wonder the bot didn't archive that page.
Sirangetta wrote:
100% should at least do something to put everything in one place and make it accessible to all. I really think the main-site should get pushed back online as well
Jackstick wrote:
Beyond those types of archives though, if we're just talking about nostalgia: everyone has their own unique nostalgia when it comes to RV. 90% of my nostalgia is from the RV chatroom, or private forums, or PMs, or even 1x1 or group conversations I had with people on MSN. A lot of that material doesn't even exist anymore, or large swathes of it were lost for various reasons.
Sirangetta wrote:
Are we doing enough? That is my question...
- When the RuneVillage server was getting decommissioned, I spent at least one full weekend figuring out what would be necessary to move the forums from one web site to another, and then at least a few days (during finals week in graduate school lol) making it actually happen. And then RV was so big that it just wouldn't actually work (kept timing out), and I had to find workarounds like manually chopping up 800MB files to make them upload successfully and in the right order. I assume whoever was in the RV Skype chat at the time saw me complaining a lot over trivial things, lol.
- Even then, lots of other problems from the move continued to pop up, which involved additional investigation and work.
- From the Burks and David post, looks like it took me only ~4 hours to resolve that mess after it happened (relatively quick IMO), but the fallout continued for a while as people wondered why they had gotten emails from David and Milo, lol.
- Something happened in February 2017 and I had to re-import the forum again. I don't remember what, but I've got folders on my computer from all the work needed to make it happen, so I guess something broke!
- And then we got hacked in August 2017, by some script kiddies who just wanted to do it to prove they could. I don't think it was necessarily visible externally (except for some prominent users having their names changed to some pretty vulgar/racist stuff) but I spent a lot of time cleaning up hacked files and figuring out how I could find if it had happened to others. This happened more than once.
- When things started to fall apart, I spent a lot of time learning tiny bits of PHP and trying to fix the errors popping up all over the place. I probably made things worse in the long run, but the errors are gone at least! You used to get like 6 stack traces and broken fonts whenever you made a post, lol.
- I mentioned this earlier, but when RV went down this past July 19th, I spent much of that weekend diving into logs and cached files, pinpointing the exact time everything broke and trying to see if anything weird happened at that time. Nothing ever came of the investigation but it was pretty thorough.
- I still make backups every month just in case!
When things are going well, it looks like we're doing nothing. But I assure you that's often not the case.
Even if it's spread out over multiple years, each of these events took many hours at a time.Applequest wrote:
I'm just thankful nobody was taken advantage of, to my knowledge - that would have been very difficult to stomach.
But yeah besides that, Apple hit all the high notes. hiker even outright admitted to using donations to fund his copy of Norton Antivirus once. Again, mods/admins would often ask how much it actually cost to fund the server and where all these donations were going, but I don't think a straight answer was ever actually given.
Applequest wrote:
For example, when he modded like 80 people at the same time, including a number of people who had no business being mods. I believe he did that because he cared about trying to give all those people the opportunity to grow. Ridiculously stupid decision for the site, but coming from a good place.
He also wouldn't let us demod them even with overwhelming evidence. Some would delete posts that disagreed with them in mod forums, y'all. I am still annoyed, to this day!
Applequest wrote:
Oh and Henner also left the site in disgrace. I believe it is because he stole from us but I can't remember 100%. Ancient history at this point. Some pair of leaders we had.
He later refunded one of my donations on PayPal in August 2012 and sent me this:
...So who even knows!
You've done an amazing job and deserve all the credit for that, just like everybody else who has attempting to keep RV going after the big crash.
I can imagine it's not easy being in charge of keeping the ship sailing, especially when it's now a relic. You didn't have to do that, just like Jackstick didn't or even Henner. Nobody had to keep this going. Right after the crash, the ship could have easily sunk. You deserve recognition for keeping things afloat and so you're not at all out of line for putting yourself on a pedestal. In fact, that's what you all need - a RuneVillage Honorary Pedestal. It should become a new rank/achievement.
What you are doing despite perhaps it not being blatantly obvious is preserving history. Sure, the internet is not going out of fashion nor will this be the only phpBB forum that existed or the last. It's a time in history where communities like this cemented their place in the record books. A history that is now being shadowed by the new generation of technology and specifically how people communicate. This is a gold mine, a window into the world of online gaming communities in a world that todays generation, and perhaps those even before this generation, will have no natural inclination to seek out and/or even be aware of. It's a time portal. Before long and as with the nature of how things work, the new generations will come in and proceed to cement their way of doing things. We're at those crossroads now where the world is in the process of becoming a very different place. It's arguably a dawn of a new era. You're at the helm of preserving a slice of what things were like in a different point in time and space.
We don't think to instinctively preserve history in Western culture. Not unless it has some sort of immediately redeeming gratification that we can gloat about and boost our egos with and feel important. We don't simply preserve our history to well, just preserve it, even if it's done when the crowds aren't watching and nobody is cheering us on. It has to be so we can be seen as the rulers of the world and how great and powerful we are. Because of this, nuanced parts of the timeline into the societies we live in are simply lost, neglected, abandoned or even manipulated to reflect an idealistic and flawed account of history.
It's nice to be part of something bigger than yourself. And to preserve that for the intention of simply preserving it is a really good thing, even if it's success when no-one is looking. After all, the best personal successes in life are the ones that occur when nobody is looking. These are the stories that start inward and gradually build outwardly towards how we are perceived by others. Silent victories are often the best and well, if you need any evidence, you've got RV here in 2021 a long time after it was scheduled to be no more. You've got a Discord server which has seen the likes of many familiar faces return, even if they are technically AFK and are not active. Hey, it still counts for something!
Each and every person who has been responsible for these things should be credited.
Statistics: Posted by Sirangetta — March 4th, 2021, 7:44 am
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Quote:
Coded by: Frank
Ugh, no wonder the bot didn't archive that page.
Sirangetta wrote:
100% should at least do something to put everything in one place and make it accessible to all. I really think the main-site should get pushed back online as well
Jackstick wrote:
Beyond those types of archives though, if we're just talking about nostalgia: everyone has their own unique nostalgia when it comes to RV. 90% of my nostalgia is from the RV chatroom, or private forums, or PMs, or even 1x1 or group conversations I had with people on MSN. A lot of that material doesn't even exist anymore, or large swathes of it were lost for various reasons.
Sirangetta wrote:
Are we doing enough? That is my question...
- When the RuneVillage server was getting decommissioned, I spent at least one full weekend figuring out what would be necessary to move the forums from one web site to another, and then at least a few days (during finals week in graduate school lol) making it actually happen. And then RV was so big that it just wouldn't actually work (kept timing out), and I had to find workarounds like manually chopping up 800MB files to make them upload successfully and in the right order. I assume whoever was in the RV Skype chat at the time saw me complaining a lot over trivial things, lol.
- Even then, lots of other problems from the move continued to pop up, which involved additional investigation and work.
- From the Burks and David post, looks like it took me only ~4 hours to resolve that mess after it happened (relatively quick IMO), but the fallout continued for a while as people wondered why they had gotten emails from David and Milo, lol.
- Something happened in February 2017 and I had to re-import the forum again. I don't remember what, but I've got folders on my computer from all the work needed to make it happen, so I guess something broke!
- And then we got hacked in August 2017, by some script kiddies who just wanted to do it to prove they could. I don't think it was necessarily visible externally (except for some prominent users having their names changed to some pretty vulgar/racist stuff) but I spent a lot of time cleaning up hacked files and figuring out how I could find if it had happened to others. This happened more than once.
- When things started to fall apart, I spent a lot of time learning tiny bits of PHP and trying to fix the errors popping up all over the place. I probably made things worse in the long run, but the errors are gone at least! You used to get like 6 stack traces and broken fonts whenever you made a post, lol.
- I mentioned this earlier, but when RV went down this past July 19th, I spent much of that weekend diving into logs and cached files, pinpointing the exact time everything broke and trying to see if anything weird happened at that time. Nothing ever came of the investigation but it was pretty thorough.
- I still make backups every month just in case!
When things are going well, it looks like we're doing nothing. But I assure you that's often not the case.
Even if it's spread out over multiple years, each of these events took many hours at a time.Applequest wrote:
I'm just thankful nobody was taken advantage of, to my knowledge - that would have been very difficult to stomach.
But yeah besides that, Apple hit all the high notes. hiker even outright admitted to using donations to fund his copy of Norton Antivirus once. Again, mods/admins would often ask how much it actually cost to fund the server and where all these donations were going, but I don't think a straight answer was ever actually given.
Applequest wrote:
For example, when he modded like 80 people at the same time, including a number of people who had no business being mods. I believe he did that because he cared about trying to give all those people the opportunity to grow. Ridiculously stupid decision for the site, but coming from a good place.
He also wouldn't let us demod them even with overwhelming evidence. Some would delete posts that disagreed with them in mod forums, y'all. I am still annoyed, to this day!
Applequest wrote:
Oh and Henner also left the site in disgrace. I believe it is because he stole from us but I can't remember 100%. Ancient history at this point. Some pair of leaders we had.
He later refunded one of my donations on PayPal in August 2012 and sent me this:
...So who even knows!
Statistics: Posted by Saten Ruiko — March 4th, 2021, 12:52 am
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Jackstick wrote:
Applequest wrote:
I believe hiker gave up the site, I can't remember who he gave admin rights to.
Henner lol.
Lol, someone has to fill in the gaps on the transition from Henner then.
I think it went...
Hiker: 2002 - 2011
Henner: 2011 - 2012
Jackstick: 2012 - 2015
Jaron: 2015 - Present day
Statistics: Posted by Jackstick — March 3rd, 2021, 10:47 pm
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Applequest wrote:
I believe hiker gave up the site, I can't remember who he gave admin rights to.
Henner lol.
Lol, someone has to fill in the gaps on the transition from Henner then.
Statistics: Posted by Applequest — March 3rd, 2021, 10:37 pm
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I believe hiker gave up the site, I can't remember who he gave admin rights to.
Henner lol.
Statistics: Posted by Jackstick — March 3rd, 2021, 10:18 pm
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Also, I don't want to dig up old bones *continues to dig them up anyway* but what exactly happened with hiker? I can remember a long time ago now RV was pulled by Jagex' supported fansites list and that was essentially a death sentence for RV. What actually was the story behind it? And how did people find out about his passing? I guess people saw him as an old guy, or that's what I can remember anyway but how old was he? Was his legend accurate? I saw a guy posting on the RV Facebook page bashing hiker and he posted a picture and he didn't seem so old (maybe in his mid to late thirties, maybe even early forties), or was that not really hiker? If he wasn't so old, what took him so early? Illnesses? Took his own life? And was the accusations of being a pedophile actually as matter of fact as stated at the time? Because if they were, there's quite a bit of controversy as to his running this site knowing his target demographic audience would have been minors. It seems a little confusing. And I cannot for the life of me find anything that explains things. It seems everybody jumped on the band wagon and demonized both hiker and RV and yet, how many people actually know the truth? Again, not the deliberately stir up what is a pretty sensitive topic. I just think it's fitting considering the fact that RV is still here in 2021 and people who come back have a right to know more than the tiny little details and rumours they heard at the time (potentially).
That's a lot of questions. It's been awhile so I have forgotten some of this, and I don't think all of the details are appropriate to share. But I think we are all old enough now and enough time has passed to deserve to understand what happened, and it is such a small and devoted audience who would read this at this point anyway.
Hiker was an old guy, in his 60s. He was a convicted pedophile from back in the 80s. Then in the 90s he got in trouble with distributing child porn online. He ended up back in jail for a long stretch in the 00's near the tail end of RV's prime. We didn't know it at the time, it was just oh hiker disappeared (and good luck running things without any authority while I'm gone Apple
). I can't remember what landed him back in jail but I believe it was something more benign, like breaking parole, and he was back within a year. Eventually, somebody put the pieces together, which were all public record, that the leader of RV has this troubling past. When that went public Jagex smartly cut ties with us immediately and things here began falling apart. I believe hiker gave up the site, I can't remember who he gave admin rights to. But it was too late, the damage was done, and the already slow decline we were on sped up. A few years later somebody posted information that he had died, I can't remember the cause.There is no doubt Hiker was way out of line to create this site given his past. He was only a few years out of prison for child porn distribution when he started RV. I also believe he was using the donations to pay for legal fees or support himself. I think he was bringing in way more than it could've been costing to host the site. It's pretty fair to say he was a bad guy in a lot of ways. If you are looking for redeemable qualities, I think he did care about the community here in general, and in the growth of people specifically. He was very difficult to work with in trying to manage the site, but not because he didn't care or try. For example, when he modded like 80 people at the same time, including a number of people who had no business being mods. I believe he did that because he cared about trying to give all those people the opportunity to grow. Ridiculously stupid decision for the site, but coming from a good place. It's hard to reconcile this against his past. It puts a dark sheen over what should have been a good story. For example, there was a relatively prominent RVer who lived like less than an hour from Hiker who was a kid. Nothing ever happened thankfully, but given slightly different circumstances, could it have? It just falls back to just how wildly inappropriate it was for Hiker to put himself in a position of extreme authority and admiration over a bunch of kids. I'm just thankful nobody was taken advantage of, to my knowledge - that would have been very difficult to stomach.
Oh and Henner also left the site in disgrace. I believe it is because he stole from us but I can't remember 100%. Ancient history at this point. Some pair of leaders we had.
Statistics: Posted by Applequest — March 3rd, 2021, 9:42 pm
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@Sirangetta
I can appreciate the idea of archiving some material on a very simple WordPress-like page, if that's what you're getting at. I think the amount of material that could realistically be archived though, would be a lot less than what you may be satisfied with. Archiving static material like stories from The Library, articles from The Villager is realistic - these are things that have a clearly defined beginning and end. We already have a lot of material archived in The Village Library and The Village Archive, but I do understand your concern about these archives existing on a forum which itself has no solid guarantee of a future.
Beyond those types of archives though, if we're just talking about nostalgia: everyone has their own unique nostalgia when it comes to RV. 90% of my nostalgia is from the RV chatroom, or private forums, or PMs, or even 1x1 or group conversations I had with people on MSN. A lot of that material doesn't even exist anymore, or large swathes of it were lost for various reasons.
For example: I never had any involvement in the RVA, but I know that that sphere of our community would almost entirely define RV-nostalgia for some people; completely different from my own definition. (I think they even had their own sister-site for a while, didn't they?)
There could even be some people that, for whatever reason, are extraordinarily nostalgic for the RV that existed in the year 2009, and they must be in a world of hurt.
I think a sharp line can be drawn between what can be archived, versus what should just remain within our individual memories. However, anything RV-related that currently exists, or may exist in the future, is directly dependent on the amount of effort and involvement that can be spent on it - and at this point we're really just talking about the efforts of one person, and whether it's actually reasonable or fair to ask for more than what we already have. The state that RV is in right now is a direct result of several years of shrinking involvement; people left, or moved on. If nothing changes and the forums eventually shut down in an irreversible way, then remember that the best way to preserve your nostalgia may just be to appreciate your own personal memories from time to time. (and hey we still have the Discord server)
Yeah, I guess. And you're dead on in regards to the line being drawn. Well, I'm glad there are some artefacts from the past in both the archives and library. There's quite a bit more than I thought there would be, which is great! And yeah, everyone has their own memories. I was just gunning for a way to collect everything together so that whatever those memories were the history of RV would be present in the best possible form ie existing like it did back then. Like say you have a family home that you haven't seen for ages. And say the neighbours found a box of your stuff but didn't fully understand the symbolic meaning this box had to you. If they kept it for years and years and one day you happened to come back and it's there for you - you'd probably be overcome with emotion and be blown away by their effort to preseve history that only you know how deeply personal and relevant it is to you. To them it's just a box.
People could then do with that as they pleased and their own way of intepreting their past would naturally run it's course. It's probably not a great idea and maybe not even the most realistic based on the fact you're now dealing with a very small handful of people that haven taken more than a few minutes of their day to actively track back. You can't blame them though, there was and is no obligation on their part. Open communities like this were designed precisely to enable pseudo-anonymity without contract back when having alter-egos that came and went on the net was all the rage. Or moreover, back when the net was predominantly based around creating new worlds that aimed to distance and in many cases, improve upon, the one that exists in everyday waking reality while acknowledging the seperation between the two. Your alter-ego WAS the opportunity to make the world a different place if only in the smallest ways. It clearly had an impact as most of us flocked to these worlds that were created by people who were not recognized and identified by their real life identities but by their imagination and involvement in something much bigger. Today it's just one homogenous gloop and the core values and culture is being lost to centralized machine-like environments that only cater to a cold, depersonalized and distant digital worlds controlled by the few for the benefit of the few while everyone are the products, the cows being milked for their data. *Cue sad music*
*Cue happy music and scene change*
I could be sooooo wrong about my suggestions/vision. Perhaps I'm out of tune with how things are being done around here. I personally stand very strongly on the preservation of history. The way things are going in the wider world and the changing of how people live their lives, access to moments in time that have meaning to people will be more difficult to fufill and realize. Sooner or later all that will be known about history will be by those who have the ability to define and manipulate it to their own wants and needs. In the digital world that will be those in control of the major platforms and those responsible for providing access to information for the masses. It's already becoming a problem now with YouTube channels that have been around for years just being wiped off the platform like they never existed. It's happening with the consolidation of vital information access points across the internet. Before long the idea of history will be scrolling through feeds on Facebook or by hoping a site like Discord has kept chat logs. It's gradually becoming a reality that more and more people are unwittingly walking into.
I guess it speaks volumes about the culture of the world we live in. And if people can walk away from important aspects of their childhood in favour of having big tech giants sucking up all their data to make billions in profit while laying out the foundations for a virtual prison whereby people cannot escape and cannot fight without having their own digital identities memoryholed, well, it's suddenly a fairly dark place to be.
Like I said, I'm probably wrong. Maybe things are good enough as they are. Maybe nothing needs to be done. I just worry that eventually the small threads holding nearly two decades of history (which on the digital world is a LONG time) will fray and RV will be lost to the drum beats of todays world. Drum beats which are deliberately drowning everything out in order to completely paralyze people into accepting a digital world that even for those of the last few years will be a whole new world. Even 'normies' are beginning to question how fast things are changing.
I mean, damn, sooner or later, Discord will be a relic and at the same time Discord will only be a toddler in comparison to the lifespan of many other foundations of the digital world before it. Growing up with Facebook will make you a digital elder and 12 year olds will be lecturing others on the ground rules of how to hold a smartphone correctly and how to make money with your vids on TikTok.
Are we doing enough? That is my question...
Also, I don't want to dig up old bones *continues to dig them up anyway* but what exactly happened with hiker? I can remember a long time ago now RV was pulled by Jagex' supported fansites list and that was essentially a death sentence for RV. What actually was the story behind it? And how did people find out about his passing? I guess people saw him as an old guy, or that's what I can remember anyway but how old was he? Was his legend accurate? I saw a guy posting on the RV Facebook page bashing hiker and he posted a picture and he didn't seem so old (maybe in his mid to late thirties, maybe even early forties), or was that not really hiker? If he wasn't so old, what took him so early? Illnesses? Took his own life? And was the accusations of being a pedophile actually as matter of fact as stated at the time? Because if they were, there's quite a bit of controversy as to his running this site knowing his target demographic audience would have been minors. It seems a little confusing. And I cannot for the life of me find anything that explains things. It seems everybody jumped on the band wagon and demonized both hiker and RV and yet, how many people actually know the truth? Again, not the deliberately stir up what is a pretty sensitive topic. I just think it's fitting considering the fact that RV is still here in 2021 and people who come back have a right to know more than the tiny little details and rumours they heard at the time (potentially).
Statistics: Posted by Sirangetta — March 3rd, 2021, 7:45 am
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Coded by: Frank
Ugh, no wonder the bot didn't archive that page.
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@Sirangetta
I can appreciate the idea of archiving some material on a very simple WordPress-like page, if that's what you're getting at. I think the amount of material that could realistically be archived though, would be a lot less than what you may be satisfied with. Archiving static material like stories from The Library, articles from The Villager is realistic - these are things that have a clearly defined beginning and end. We already have a lot of material archived in The Village Library and The Village Archive, but I do understand your concern about these archives existing on a forum which itself has no solid guarantee of a future.
Beyond those types of archives though, if we're just talking about nostalgia: everyone has their own unique nostalgia when it comes to RV. 90% of my nostalgia is from the RV chatroom, or private forums, or PMs, or even 1x1 or group conversations I had with people on MSN. A lot of that material doesn't even exist anymore, or large swathes of it were lost for various reasons.
For example: I never had any involvement in the RVA, but I know that that sphere of our community would almost entirely define RV-nostalgia for some people; completely different from my own definition. (I think they even had their own sister-site for a while, didn't they?)
There could even be some people that, for whatever reason, are extraordinarily nostalgic for the RV that existed in the year 2009, and they must be in a world of hurt.
I think a sharp line can be drawn between what can be archived, versus what should just remain within our individual memories. However, anything RV-related that currently exists, or may exist in the future, is directly dependent on the amount of effort and involvement that can be spent on it - and at this point we're really just talking about the efforts of one person, and whether it's actually reasonable or fair to ask for more than what we already have. The state that RV is in right now is a direct result of several years of shrinking involvement; people left, or moved on. If nothing changes and the forums eventually shut down in an irreversible way, then remember that the best way to preserve your nostalgia may just be to appreciate your own personal memories from time to time. (and hey we still have the Discord server)
Statistics: Posted by Jackstick — March 3rd, 2021, 12:09 am
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The currency is in preserving the online worlds of past when we are headed for a digital world that is set about memory holing what is no longer relevant. Sure, you'll always be able to use sites like Archive.org but they won't provide the personal touch. Plus, many people don't know where to start when it comes to that stuff.
Think of it like an RV Museum of sorts! Instead of things being like hide and seek they can be out in the open and RV has a public facing entrance to a nuanced period in time where things were a lot different and the privelege of living in a time when all that could be stored and brought to life easily.
All (or as much) of RV in one place indefinetly. If something happens there is a community shared backup in the front facing 'museum' of RV.
Might not seem relevant now but in 2050 or 2060 or even 2100 who knows whether looking back on online gaming communities during the dawn of the millenium and years on from that becomes a curiosity or perhaps future generations (your future generations perhaps?) might want to know what the online world was like before the dawn of social media and hyperconnected digital society, smartphone wizardry and when all you needed was basic knowledge of installing a bulletin board on a web server and when online communities were more localized and personal even if you lived a thousand miles across the planet.
It's massively unimportant while also being really important. Massively unimportant because it's just a grain of sand in the ocean of time and space and seems irrelevant. Massively important because RV was at the epicenter of a particular niche time in history that will never be repeated again regardless of whether it's on Facebook Groups with one hundred thousand members or today on Runescape where most players will be largely isolated from what it means to be playing a massive online game like Runescape and, well, living IN the world of Runescape and the ecosystems around it and being fully submerged in a culture that many people like myself as a child became like a second home.
Get things all in one place and try and piece together RV of old in a way that allows the past to be best reflected far off into the future. If the forum dies and Discord is the only remaining place, how many will know to look there? What happens if Discord is no longer the cool place to be? Who will get the memo? By then communication with everyone might be almost impossible. The Facebook page hasn't been updated for years, same with the Twitter account. But yet people still want to return. And they can only do it right now because the door is kinda open and people are still here. That might not always be the case.
What happens then?
It would be really cool to drop the anchor and ensure RV sticks around in the most reliable and sensible way instead of relying solely on the hopes the forum doesn't one day break completely or Discord sticks around or some forum member doesn't disappear etc. It doesn't mean the world ends if you can't look back and most people won't even blink an eye but that isn't to say they wouldn't react differently if they could have had the opportunity to look back, or that looking back wasn't important in the first place. Most people surrender to the fact these things are out of their control. It's on a hard drive somewhere, it's on a website somewhere, Google did something with it etc. These are all pretty useless scenarios. The question is - is it really out of their control? If people could have a choice, albeit for a few minutes of their day to scroll through a few pages relating to their childhood instead of giving up and carrying on with their day having known no different, would they?
Clearly people come back to RV for a reason. I'm not saying the whole thing will come crashing down tomorrow or that there is an impending apocalypse upon us (or is there?). Holding that door open is the best thing you can do while also being able to take a back seat and know there is a template there that can be used and used again to prop up the history of this place which will beat any patch for the forum, any third party chat app etc.
Statistics: Posted by Sirangetta — March 2nd, 2021, 8:48 pm
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Jaron, Jackstick - thank you both for your efforts on this
I had a great time reading it again after all these years.I think my favorite part was how a camera that took one picture every 5 seconds was considered a perfect substitute for video. Oh, 2005!
I don't have room to talk, though, I had dial-up internet for two more years past that point, lol.
Statistics: Posted by Saten Ruiko — March 2nd, 2021, 7:49 pm
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That, my friends, was me trying to be creative with my writing. I had forgotten how long the article was and now many characters were in it. What a blast from the past.
Jaron, Jackstick - thank you both for your efforts on this
I had a great time reading it again after all these years. -Phat
Statistics: Posted by Phat Hobo — March 2nd, 2021, 12:36 pm
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