Author: popeofh October 30, 2016

 

Introduction:

Hi, i’m Popehentai. Some of you may know me from a slew of romhacks about Wilford Brimley. If you don’t thats cool, consider this a bit of self promotion, for an antique joke. now why is a rom-hacker that has been around as long as me writing an extensive article for a site like this? Well let me tell you a few stories…

Romhacking has been a hobby of mine for a long time… since the mid 90s. In that time one site has come to be the largest repository of hacks and translations, Romhacking.net, or RHDN. at some point in history, some romhackers were making hacks of a lewd or lascivious nature. I did it, plenty of others did. Some of those were hosted on RHDN. One hack in particular, “Fuckers quest” caused a shitstorm, as the hacker was finished with it, but the admins decided it wasn’t finished “enough”. Some members of the community even argued about what “qualified” to be put on the site, and whether hacks containing certain content should even be allowed in the first place. This eventually led to “badhacks.com” a community forerunner to this site, where any hacks were welcome, without any real judgement on content or quality, as the rules at RHDN were often enforced with no regard to regularity or “rule of law”.

This led one of the “badhacks” users on a campaign to show just how douchey the user were at RHDN, doing a several page long expose where they posed as a “noob” and asked for help. of course this led to a mountain of people only proving accusations of elitism and general jackassery. there are more details, though if you can find it i would suggest looking at that expose yourself.

Those basics bring us to where we are now. A few years have passed, some of the users that were being elitist jackasses have since moved on from the romhacking community. the “bad” hacks community has grown more and more competent, often giving games complete overhauls, with many technical changes, and even changes to a games engine itself. I would honestly posit though, that the community at RHDN has only gotten worse. What i’m going to present to you is a small slice of almost 8 moths of bias, abuse, denial, and ignorance from the users, staff, and former staff, of RHDN.

Note: this article was announced on the “baddesthacks” forum, and in the time between its announcement with a full outline of what threads would be mentioned, and its publication, Several of the threads archived for posterity have since “disappeared” from the RHDN forum.
2) Dr Floppy’s “war on women”

For our first tale, we will present on “Dr Floppy”. If you are not familiar with him he is the possible the most knowledgeable person in the romhacking community at the time about the NES music engine. In a thread about how to get more people interested in rom-hacking the question was asked “why are there so few women involved in this scene?”, To which Doc replied:

Dr, Floppy is then subject to a torrent of abuse, comparing him to Ferengi from “Star Trek” with an image of Quark seething “feeemales”, another post spouting “bro culture” memes by presenting rambling quotes from a “Teen Titans Go!” episode, one quoting the post and replacing the entire body of text with “Sexist rant disguised as reason.” and positing that because there are a few exceptions, generalities do not apply, and another asking for citations, to which a reply was posted providing a commercial about prunes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSzqLOLIMvs

So we’re left with the question, Was this worth a temporary ban? Was this really any more “disrespectful” that the attacks and accusations that followed it? In answering that we move ahead to another thread, where Baddesthacks admin “Rotwang” lets people know of Floppys ban, lest they need to contact him for any of the many community projects he was working on, or helping with, at the time. Some curious users ask why he was banned, and i present the idea that ti was for “political correctness” reasons, based on the reason given in his ban message. Some users, such as “Vortex” and “mathuser2929” and a moderator known as “I.S.T.” (all of whom will be discussed at length later) either celebrated, or made excuses for the ban. Here we can also see one of the other many problems with the forums… deletion of evidence, as I.S.T. makes reference to something that cannot be proven, due to its complete removal. We will also see more of this later, as whole swaths of later stories are confirm-able only through third party sources.

I then present that what Floppy said was based in fact, and that as much as they were screaming about being respectful, not allowing any dissenting opinion despite it being factual was hardly “respectful”. I was then asked to present evidence that what Floppy said was right through “pier reviewed” studies with I.S.T. going on a curse laden rant demanding them. and after being proven ultimately wrong, the head moderator, Mathonnapkins then comes in and locks the thread.

Interesting things about MathonNapkins post… his first point, about emails, was the exact purpose of the thread, a means to contact Dr Floppy without his email address. His second point may have held some weight, but doesn’t really matter after his third point, that they don’t ban based on politics, while the discussion in the thread had clearly determined was a lie. He then goes on to talk about “how something is said” and claim “It’s the difference between between calling someone a string of expletives versus stating all the reasons you think they are wrong.” after we had just, several posts previous, watched a moderator go on a profanity laden tirade against me for making the claim that Floppys original post contained factual information. Of course these threads are currently unavailable on their forum, being put down the “memory hole” shortly after being archived.

http://archive.is/aJsA7
http://archive.is/Nizzb
http://archive.is/rp2Md
http://archive.is/79oLy
http://archive.is/guGQ6
http://archive.is/d6DLm