Messages

16

Off Topic / Re: I keep opening the forum to see if there's anything new and interesting on here

« on: October 29, 2023, 03:44:41 AM »

Same here, I don't have the site bookmarked but it always shows up as the 3rd item in my address bar.

I wish I stuck around more like you did and made some lasting friends here. At some point in my teenage angst I "left" the forum for the good part of 3 or 4 years or something like that, and removed anyone associated with the forum from my Steam friends list. While I did make a lot of friends in high school that I still talk with regularly today, it'd be nice to know someone I've known since I was a kid to reminisce about our time here.

Unrelated, and you may not remember it but I remember sending you a hate PM a long time ago way-back-when your Night Fox account was still fresh. Something along the lines of "furries bad, go back to your old one". Either way, I sincerely apologize for that and I wish you well.

17

Off Topic / Re: who are you, Guest?

« on: September 25, 2023, 01:42:52 AM »

My guess bots archiving it looking for "groomers". If so they're gonna be surprised when they realize it's 90% tony and the rest is people genuinely watching colorful horses.

Either that or someone actually likes the thread and doesn't wanna lose it but I kinda doubt anyone would put the effort into it unless they were trying to dunk on someone.

Probably bots, but it's more than likely they're web crawlers scraping forum posts for training data.

18

Drama / Re: my final message to badspot

« on: September 24, 2023, 12:19:34 AM »

https://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=135632.0
https://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=140207.0

-snip-

It must've completely fallen out of my conscious mind just how bad it actually was. I remember all of this. Jesus christ.

Looking back at the BLF's history, it's absolutely insane what kind of stuff this community just glanced over and let slide back then

I guess when you're a kid you don't give it much thought. I remember reading those mailbags without a second thought as to how immature and messed up they were. Now I feel pretty damn bad for saying this place wasn't too bad before.

19

Drama / Re: my final message to badspot

« on: September 21, 2023, 05:57:47 AM »

Banning the forum account + revoking their key would certainly help prevent future victims, especially if they're put on a ban on sight list. Of course you can't stop it, but it can certainly be mitigated; Badspot had not taken any of these measures to mitigate these behaviors. Also, they would likely wind up messaging someone who did know the signs and report it. It's not a guarantee for sure. However, it's not the fact that he failed to prevent it; it's the fact he took no measures at all to prevent or mitigate it unless it was glaringly obvious and sometimes not even then.

I wouldn't be assigning a decent amount of blame to Badspot if he took steps to not let things like this happen.

My apologies, I hadn't considered a lot of this. When you put it like that, I wholeheartedly agree.

20

Drama / Re: my final message to badspot

« on: September 20, 2023, 03:41:47 AM »

but it's also worth mentioning that even that is also not as clear cut as it first seems since the internet was still relatively new and most older people weren't familiar with it even going into the early 2010's when Blockland was at it's height in popularity.

That is true.

Badspot is responsible because it's still his responsibility as the owner of the site to, you know, moderate it. You could argue that poor upbringing is the reason that people get into grooming situations, and you would largely be right. However, it's hard to deny that if Badspot actually banned many of the groomers (and we're not even getting into the racism/family values/telling the entire forum to kill themselves) then the risk of getting groomed on the Blockland Forums would be significantly lower even with the stuffty upbringing. This was something he was aware of and is completely within his power to accomplish, whether by hiring actual moderators or doing it himself.

Problem is even if he genuinely cared and was proactive in stopping it, he would've still been quite powerless to stop it. Grooming often happens outside the site where they meet there victim, where a predator can maintain a better private channel of communication with their victim (ex. Steam, Skype, Discord, etc).
This by itself is why keeping children safe online has always been notoriously difficult and why even big platforms still struggle to deal with it. The best line of defense to prevent a child from being groomed will always start at home.

Even if it was brought to Badspot's attention and he had banned the predator's forum account and revoked their key for good measure- it's already too late because the grooming has been taken elsewhere where Badspot cannot moderate. If most of these grooming attempts were initiated via forum PM, he would not have known about it unless the victim had reported it.

21

Drama / Re: my final message to badspot

« on: September 13, 2023, 02:40:19 AM »

Eh I'm trying not to be bigoted or hateful.
But like, ironically it does feel like the OP has unresolved issues they are projecting onto Badspot in a toxic way.

While Badspot is a pretty flawed and pathetic person, he doesn't deserve a lot of this blame for people's personal problems. Every person who still clings to this place despite thinking it was the worst thing ever should evaluate whether something was Badspot's fault or the fault of their upbringing. I'd wager a lot of these folks (Swallow included) were on here completely unsupervised while growing up, lacked the direction/support they needed as a child/teen, or were already suffering from unfortunate living circumstances in their offline life.

Really his worst crime would be telling a child on the Internet that they're an idiot. Nonetheless, I hope these folks get the genuine help they need, because blaming Badspot for their current troubles while convenient, is not going to help them in the long run.

22

Off Topic / Re: What was Blockland?

« on: September 11, 2023, 10:38:01 AM »

Forum members be coming out of high school with an instinctual desire to make lengthy reflective coming-of-age posts in Off Topic as if being on this forum as a child was akin to growing up on some Lord of the Flies-esque Epstein Island.

Looking back, a lot of the drama on this forum was pretty pathetic. It never really took much for some crybaby to write an entire drama thread for not liking you because you're acting immature or some stuff. _{Cough cough, Lord Tony}
7 years ago, when I was a handicapped 11 year old, I was glad to have been the center of one in which I managed to set off a stuff ton of dumb teenagers on a lego forum.

What were you expecting when you have a forum full of children and young teens? Civil, thought-provoking discussion about plastic bricks? Did you ever interact with the other kids on the playground or in the lunchroom when you too were a child?

Please, congregate any amount of older children/young teens in the same space for any prolonged amount of time and tell me your findings.

I am supermarioRX1029.
-snip-
I could list off so many funny takes of mines, but I would fill up this entire thread doing so, so I implore you to look into it yourself. Just incredible, immaculate, words of intellect, really. I think about how Badspot had to wake up the next day to see that his community was arguing with this one random handicap posting this stupid stuff, lol. Reading some of the stuff I had said back then makes me cackle, and even more so when I think about how all of those people were taking an argument with an 11 year old so seriously. But honestly, this forum did teach me a bit of a lesson on how to not act like a complete loving idiot online as I was maturing.

When you were maturing? You're rather quick to distance yourself from the posts you made as a child, yet here you are almost proudly displaying your ebin takes when you were an 11 y/o with amusement in the same breath.

We can't fight change, and we can't fight growing up no matter how hard we try.

Dude you're 18; you're an adult exclusively in the legal sense. You are not out of the woods.

I'm going to spare the future you the extra embarrassment of not critiquing the rest of your rather pretentious self-loathing rant on your younger self and the community because I'm going to assume you wrote all of this when you were particularly moody and thought it was deep, mature, and brave.
In 2 to 8 years tops you'll (hopefully) remember posting this, lying awake at night staring at your ceiling wishing you didn't. Hopefully then it'll dawn on you that your experience here was not only short but extremely average compared to everyone else's.

23

Off Topic / Re: blockland rebuilt

« on: July 23, 2023, 05:24:24 AM »

Since nobody else would; I've grabbed the most recent version off Rebuilt's site and ran it through. The whole zip. You're welcome.
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/3e1ffbe9aeef837cc24254fa9e801cc0772cecc798daf6a1beab22f2407a6327/behavior

Here's the lone executable because nobody thought to post the link to the results. Having us all collectively decide to settle with a cropped cherry-picked screenshot instead.
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c0d53acda956cfdfc73d7c84c523f09347c15b7b24a2c236baa56dc46ea2144a/behavior

I don't see anything out of the ordinary. You can't guarantee anything, but it's more than likely safe.

but it seems the actual goal here is an undignified and thinly veiled attempt to strong-arm them into open source

Aside from soldier perhaps, nobody is trying to strong-arm them into doing anything.

24

Off Topic / Re: blockland rebuilt

« on: July 23, 2023, 12:27:30 AM »

also also also: what if i wanted to create my own fork? like, if i just wanted to make my own version with my own features? or to try and contribute improvements to existing features? or even if this was to go the way of blockland and stop being actively maintained, with developers who are difficult to reach or else? i don't see any particular reason to be hostile over even the prospect of it being open source, manteuro

This. The whole community would benefit from it being open source. I don't understand why the Rebuilt team necessitates that feature requests go through them, as if they made it open source people would be able to create those features themselves and submit them as pull requests.
This would completely open up what the game can do, and issues such as the game running on ancient engine code would no longer be an issue.

It would also null any doubt that Rebuilt doesn't have any malicious code too, of course.

soldier is the person who has no experience with computer security thinks hes smarter at identifying what really is or isnt a problem than people with actual experience
the difference here is its going to be a lot harder to hold clay hanson/kenko/etc accountable if there is an actual backdoor in their software compared to a person who has to give up anonymity to publish their software on a public, managed marketplace to ensure if there are issues they can be held accountable

I don't think accountability is the main issue here. Personally, I'm not going to blindly trust and run any opaque application from this community because of its history of putting backdoors in add-ons and third-party applications.

Conan why so hurtful? Are the mountains of evidence not enough for you?

I would hardly consider a small handful of antivirus detentions as absolute evidence that Rebuilt has anything malicious in it.

Looking at the VirusTotal results I'm guessing the ones that detect anything think it might be a keylogger. Considering how easy it would be for a naïve developer to implement keyboard input that could raise alarms versus one that doesn't, I wouldn't be too surprised if this was the reason. That's just my theory though.
If this is true, it would still bring in the question why these detections would have disappeared after an update, and why they were there to begin with if the vanilla version of the base game did not have these- as either implementation isn't something you can just mistakenly arrive to during decompilation.

Why we're 10 pages into this thread and nobody has bothered to run Rebuilt in its entirety in VirusTotal's sandbox is beyond me. I would do it myself but I do not have the one that tripped virus scanners on me.

25

Off Topic / Re: blockland rebuilt

« on: July 22, 2023, 07:38:52 AM »

that's a great idea, i sure hope nobody tries to prevent that from happening by creating another version of the game that splinters the community, that'd suck

Good lord if I had a nickel for every time someone has echoed this.



Yeah, let's not splinter a community of around 60 people at most during peak hours for a game that is no longer maintained by its developer. You can argue that 60 people can fill roughly 2 servers, but that's still not a player count you can recover from. I don't care if half of them are playing Medieval RP or Grappleknife, it's just not going to happen.

The game is long past the point of no return and making everyone congregate to same version isn't somehow going to revitalize its community. Most people who were once into the game are either playing Brickadia or have moved on entirely, so you may as well come to terms with that and play whatever version you want.

26

Off Topic / Re: blockland rebuilt

« on: July 22, 2023, 04:09:11 AM »

I don't suspect or accuse Kenko and his team of doing anything nefarious, but given that something as simple as a version launcher isn't open source, and that Rebuilt's source isn't public either is rather off-putting.

Given the history of this forum and its members, I don't think caution or even suspicion is an unreasonable reaction to any of this.

27

Off Topic / Re: blockland rebuilt

« on: July 18, 2023, 12:28:05 AM »

they have made the source available but they don't allow it to be modified period

I'm presuming it's only available somewhere in their Discord. Because as far as I can tell it's not available elsewhere.
Not sure what conditions bind others with the exempt of the Rebuilt team to be able to make changes to the source and compile it themselves. Unless I'm misunderstanding something here.

Personally I'd enjoy replacing the old legacy OpenGL code with Vulkan, for fun.

lol

28

Off Topic / Re: blockland rebuilt

« on: July 17, 2023, 08:59:08 PM »

Very impressive, I didn't even think anything like this was even possible.

It would be nice if the de-compiled source was made public, though.

29

Drama / Re: Badspot came back (kinda)

« on: June 30, 2023, 03:29:35 AM »

The only reason Badspot bothered to return to this place is to argue with someone. Man really has not changed in 18 years.

30

Drama / Re: RIP

« on: March 08, 2023, 12:28:23 AM »

This is almost too surreal to believe.

But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and believe you're being honest: You've undoubtedly had a very applaudable commitment to the bit. I don't doubt you've become one of the small handful of people that most people will still think of when they look back on this place for better or worse.

I actually don't even hate bronies that much I just wanted to stir up drama.

Can confirm you got 14-year-old me mad. 10/10

yeah I don't know if you guys noticed but I've been trying to distance myself from the forums for awhile now. I thought it would be funny to one day stop posting with zero explanation as one last troll

I always presumed you were just getting disinterested because of the decline in activity here.