Chaosscizzors/Autobiography
Originally posted at AlltheFallen.ninja. Copied and pastied here in order to spare you from ever having to visit that hellhole.
i'm going to try and kill two birds with one stone here. i've been considering making this post for years now but i never did because i didn't want to talk about myself. the topic of atf's history and my own are one and the same. given the current circumstances and the rising curiosity of where i've gone, now seems like the most appropriate time to write this.
first of all, i'm not gone. you wont see me on here but i'm very much watching and trying to keep things on track. at the end of this write up i'll explain more.
it seems like everybody in this community and their pet cat wants to know atf's history, but to really understand where atf came from and why it's here today we need to go back to when i was 19. at that time i had just discovered lolicon and i was worried about my being a pedophile. my worry led me to search for pedophiles so i could get an understanding of what my concerns were really about. that ultimately led me to a forum called loliconrus.org (now lolicit.org).
at the time lru was still young and it had some lofty ideals that i had quickly grown attached to. lru's community promoted intelligent discussion with parties that were considered to be equals, pedophiles included. i spent most of my time there slowly growing my understand of pedophilia in general. eventually i started participating as well and before long i became one of the most prominent members on the site, just below the staff members themselves.
just for the sake of nostalgia i'm going to list off the ones i remember. emt, jadore, hxl, lolicon4life, fearless, tsorea... and someone else who's name escapes me (whom i coincidentally had demoted some years later).
one of the biggest complaints by members of the community was spam. lru had a rule stating that you need 20 posts to see the gallery, so that of course led to dozens to a hundred or more pointless spam messages being posted daily. the spam was overwhelming and i tasked myself with solving the issue. i formed a small group of volunteer janitors to mark spam and it was a mostly successful effort. before long this led to me being promoted to a moderator so i could handle the job of removing spam first hand, and i did just that for 2-3 years. me and emt handled 99% of the garbage on the site and things were working out quite well. the forums were cleaner than ever before and i had a chance to give back to a community that helped me better understand myself.
eventually i worked my way up to admin. emt was put in a forced hiatus because of his disruptive behavior (which in his defense, was justified insomuch that he was going thru a very difficult period in his life) and it was up to me to pick up the slack. by that point i was already handling nearly all of the spam anyway. by now we had a few changes in the staff as well, most notably some_guy was a moderator. i had voice my support of this move but i didn't realize at the time how much that action would bite me in the ass later down the road.
also at this time we had another new mod, tiramisu. tiramisu was at the time a prominent member of flatchan but nobody really knew that except jadore, myself and perhaps a few others on the staff. before too long tiramisu voiced concern about the site being shut down due to usa law, which is where we were hosted at the time. this is where things started to turn sour for myself.
my closes friend on the staff, jadore, left the site out of fear of her presence there being used against her at some point. the specifics are still a bit lost on me. this entire period can be summed up simply as paranoia in the ranks. hxl moved the site to jckf's server to avoid legal troubles and i decided to step away from the site as the paranoia was just a bit revolting to me. this community had always stood as a symbol for equality in the face of oppression in my eyes and with this unabashed display of fear present that surreal interpretation of what lru was came crashing down. hxl also stepped down as owner of lru and passed that title to some_guy.
with nowhere to go and nothing to do i spent my time mostly on /b/ lurking and occasionally starting or participating in a loli thread. there i came to know posters like pylons and necrovalley but i remained largely out of sight, still sulking over the upheaval of lru and quite frankly not wanting much to do with /b/'s bullshit.
a few months later i made my way back to lru and decided i'd try participating there again. however, by then things had been irrevocably changed and before long i noticed. lru was nothing but a ghost of its former self. in my frustration i decided i would attempt to make a replacement for lru. i asked jckf if i could park my forum on his server and he agreed. with that done i more or less left lru permanently and a few other members followed me to the first iteration of atf.
the first draft of atf was run by myself, dave (a troublemaker from lru whom i was a friend of at the time), iamdarkness (who went by a different name at the time that i can't remember, and who would eventually become a member of the staff at lru, and whom i had ironically introduced to lru during my visit to lah) and i think armoro was a mod there at the time as well. things were quite and comfortable. me and my small circle of friends spent our time posting bullshit and having fun. not long after the site came online i found myself in a relationship. at a point i had spent about 5 consecutive days away from atf and with my now ex, and the members of atf took that as a sign that i had abandoned the site for some reason. i returned to find atf completely dead and so i decided i would simply make atf into a loli archive of sorts.
some time passed and word had reached me that some_guy was planning to give ownership of lru to someone else. naturally i tried to persuade him to give the site to me so that i may reshape the site into what it once was, but of course the site was passed to twilight, a relative newcomer that some_guy had taken a liking to. this eventually led to lru becoming lolicit. lru was forever dead now.
not long after i was approached by dave about restarting atf. him, nate and armoro weren't too pleased with twilight's approach to running lolicit, and rightfully so. i decided to give it another shot and the second iteration of atf was born. this time around i had a great deal of help from anarchywolf46 who was one of lru's main coders. with his help atf rose to the top of google and people flowed in rapidly and constantly. i also took it upon myself to try and recruit some people from /b/, which is how necrovalley and loliconman found us and eventually became members of the staff. this was also the time we set the record for most people on atf at once, unsurprisingly. that number was left unchallenged for years and i don't actually recall if that record was ever broken.
a year or so passed and everything was running smoothly. you may not believe me when i say this but there was indeed a time when atf wouldn't go offline at all. everything ran smoothly and we rose to the top of this niche corner of the internet next to flatchan and lah. eventually we started having server problems, however. at first it was minor; a power outage, broken hard drive. however these problems seemed to persist and before long atf became notorious for constantly being offline.
around this time i was approached by slayerduck, the founder of lolibooru.com. cheesey, the former owner of flatchan, had stepped down and passed his site to his close friend shankatsuforte. forte reshaped flatchan into violetchan, his old site that i know nothing about. during this time he decided he wanted to remove lolibooru from the site altogether. slayduck obviously didn't like this so he copied the contents of lolibooru and went looking for someone to pass them to. atf happened to be the first result on google at the time and so, lolibooru was passed to me.
i'm still not sure if that was the right thing to do. my mind was so focused on the prospect of saving an important piece of lolicon culture that i didn't think to consider the consequences. members of the former lolibooru flooded atf and the landscape of the community was forever changed. atf became massive and this all culminated with a DoS attack. i can't be sure if it was aimed directly at atf or not as we were on a shared server, but it happened either way.
once the smoke cleared and atf had come back up we had to move to another server. jckf was no longer connected to the server directly (and the details of that will remain ambiguous out of my respect for him) and we had been needing to move the site for quite some time because of that anyway. dark_matter approached me and offered to move atf to a shared hostgator server that he was using for his own site (sorry, the name of the site escapes me right now).
not long after that i was without internet for a few months. during that time hostgator had found out that we were hosting lolicon and they didn't care for that very much. the service was terminated and atf was lost. dark_matter moved his site to a server run by kitsuna and atf followed him. and now here we are.
some time after i received lolibooru's images i became sick. i've spent this year trying to find the cause and it hasn't been very successful. at the time of writing this the diagnosis is gasteroparesis, but the cause is unknown. soon i will be going in for more tests to determine if the cause is a failed h. pillori treatment and also if my heart is strong enough to handle the antibiotics used to mitigate the symptoms of gasteroparresis. because of this and the overwhelming amount of time and effort required to run atf i've decided to pass the bulk of the responsibility to gilgamesh who i know will do a great job in preserving my vision for atf. i am still very much in charge of atf and i am still monitoring the site from behind the scenes, only now i will be spending the bulk of my time working on my other projects and focusing on conquering my new found illness.
i've become rather detached from atf this past year or so anyway. atf has grown into its own entity and it's no longer the project i started years ago. i don't find myself interested in the discussion taking place on atf and i think it's better if i leave atf to itself from now on. it's time you guys start taking care of yourselves because i simply can't keep doing it alone anymore.
another question i see a lot is what happened to dave. to put it simply, he was banned from atf quite some time ago for harassing a member of atf. he was always a bit of a variable and i kind of expected it to happen eventually. there was a reason why he was considered a troublemaker on lru, after all.
i think that's about everything. if you have any questions or comments then post them below and i will see it, but don't expect a reply from me directly. i'll probably have gilga pass any pertinent information to you if necessary.
