Applequest wrote:
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.
oh my god i laughed so friggin hard at this lmao
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
An admirable goal to be sure, but much easier said than done. The main pages worked off of RV's database (which I'm not sure is intact) and PHP (which I don't know). Additionally, and my memory is super fuzzy here because I wasn't an admin at the time, but didn't Jagex send us some sort of cease-and-desist to stop using RuneScape images on our site? Something in the back of my mind is telling me we stopped hosting guides because we were forced to, but I could be totally wrong.
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.
+1 to this. Most of my nostalgia is answering questions on the Questions Forum and helping people out across the forums. But because the forums were often pruned (posts take space, yo) most of that is permanently gone
by design.
Sirangetta wrote:
Are we doing enough? That is my question...
I know it's opaque to everyone else (and I am
absolutely not trying to put myself on a pedestal here or anything) but it's still a non-zero amount of time that went into keeping the forums up. Some examples:
- 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.
I'll also note that during all my time as an admin, no one ever approached me privately with regards to anything bad about hiker. Again, it's only to my knowledge as well, but it's some sort of solace at least.
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.
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH
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.
When Henner took over from hiker, he gathered donations for the server costs, and then promptly disappeared.
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.
Can't lie, I still kinda do but I don't think I have it in me to post as much as I used to.
" being the most popular emoji on these forums.
I might do some more digging later this week if I find the time.
