AAAAAAHHHH!!! AAAAAAHHHH!!! AAAAAAHHHH!!! AAAAAAHHHH!!!
Discuss.
oh no, what about the alleged msnp19 documentation that i was some people were promised months ago
anyway
the worst fallout is probably what happens to the people that paid for pre-release channels, but that will probably be solved quickly enough, should anyone even still have those perks.
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Good.
Thatās because itās obviously discontinued already. I can already tell that.
I founded it out in the Escargot website itself. Itās either gonna be fixed up or itās just gonna straight up not. Hope the people of Escargot is doing ok tho.
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I personally think that Nina and Escargot should split again, with Escargot having a new ownership structure. Preferably both should just get new owners, but baby steps first, right?
Iāve discussed with Kay on this in passing, but Escargot/NINA under the current ownership is very restrictive on any of the components being open sourced. I am not going to put any words in his mouth, just mentioning that I had the conversation from someone more familiar with preservation.
While I was writing this, Escargot had published the justification for why they deleted the Discord server. I mean, it makes sense, but then uh.. did anyone think about preserving the contents of that Discord server? From my perspective (other friends having access to the server previously, and then being suddenly notified of that access being revoked), it seems like the server was deleted without notice. Typically, you would want a Discord with roughly 14,000 members (13,101 as of last API capture on Wayback Machine) to be partially if not fully archived.
Some donation perks like the Messenger for Mac test program were housed inside of that Discord, so do people just.. lose access to that? I donāt have any further information on what the closure means for perks that were housed in the Discord. (cc @Animadoria or @tonyshowoff, and I guess for a few other things I can discuss down here)
Thereās also the long standing issue Iāve had of one-time donations mapping to perks such as most egregiously (in my opinion), a shorter username. With the migration of Escargotās username, I was no longer able to use my 3-character username that I had used ā¦ pretty much everywhere! So I ended up having to be boring and used my (now dead)name. I havenāt touched Escargot much after that, because having such an abrupt change occur, as childish it may be to assert, kinda fucks with the experience. These donation tiers are also outdated, as the Discord has been superseded by Nothing. Nothing is good, but then that completely disrupts a community. These forums exist, and so do NINAās, but judging by the fact that these forums arenāt very active, and NINAās forums were just subject to a spam attack ā¦ uh ā¦ are we sure we canāt let a perfectly functioning forum software handle it? Itād be good traffic for MessengerGeek.
ā¦ Okay, sorry, tangent time. What the absolute fuck am I reading here about Tony, CMIIW, forgiving and forgetting potential distribution of CSAM? I guess the DMCA is fine because it wasnāt as up to truth but like.. dude. Alright, whatever. I feel like deleting the server over this, as much as it had been resolved with that staff member being banned for effective eons, is overexertion of opportunity. Itās hand in hand with the whole preservation thing, and as a small slight against you ā¦ Discord doesnāt care about a handful of people reporting what was probably contextless messages from years ago, as long as server staff had correctly handled that at the time of infraction and booted them the hell you. More context would be nice, and if any is needed, corrections. Iām writing this mildly late and would not like to blindly accuse of potential tomfoolery.
Anyway, wink.MG would greatly benefit from increased activity, with the benefit of letting NINA and Escargot staff moderate. It would bring the forums more activity, on an objective level.
I do see the ebbing pledge to try and open-source stuff, so ā¦ actually, instead of being all hopeless like I have been for the past few years, do you have a potential roadmap? @Animadoria specifically a question for your end. You can be as concrete or as loose as you want that roadmap to be, as I imagine efforts are rather all over the place.
I think Iām all over the place too, so hereās a TL:DR;
- WTF is going to happen with all of the stuff people paid for?
- Was the server archived at all?
- Bitching/moaning about losing my username thanks to the username@escargot.chat system and three-letters being put behind an effective paywall
- Me being rightfully upset with past Tony (again, CMIIW) and essentially waving off potential CSAM/DMCA reports
- Asking about if NINA/Escargot and wink.MG would be up for any sort of combined forum operation
Back on open-sourcing, with less on the approach of āwe canāt really do any of this because [previous reasons that I forgot, honestly]ā and more of āwe just have to clean this upā, is there any roadmap on that operation? What kind of additions and changes to Escargotās infrastructure were made after Mar 22, 2021 (last commit to GitLab)? Other than like, NINA ICQ yah yah yah .. not to undermine, but Iām looking for all the technical fun bits, nothing too horrifically obvious. Is Escargot still Escargot, or is the server software under a new name? Has it been relicensed?
Okay, complaining and overanalysis over! Sorry for the essay, I love details.
edit: There was a severe amount of babbling about free speech and potential dissent suppression, but uh.. weāre mostly normal people here, right? Why would I worry about that when thereās greater things to be worried about, such as toxicity and problem children. That babbling has been removed.
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Uh, no I absolutely didnāt forgive nor forget, I immediately banned, I never offered forgiveness for anything.
- WTF is going to happen with all of the stuff people paid for?
All that will be up on the site soon
- Was the server archived at all?
Not really.
- Bitching/moaning about losing my username thanks to the username@escargot.chat system and three-letters being put behind an effective
Sorry about that, but did you ever say anything? Maybe we couldāve worked something out with that. Let me know what name you wanted, do you have a current username?
- Me being rightfully upset with past Tony (again, CMIIW) and essentially waving off potential CSAM/DMCA reports
Except I never did that, in fact as soon as I figured out what was happening, I immediately banned him, I didnāt even ask for finer details, the accusation alone had enough teeth I thought to take immediate action as soon as I went through the back log. At first I was confused because the situation was on-going, I missed the start of it, and I thought the main issue was DMCA stuff and trying to figure out what even happened, but when it became clear the CSAM accusations were going on, I just banned him right away.
Back on open-sourcing
If you read the latest news entry, at the bottom, we will be doing that. We need to sort of refactor things to make it more useful for the outside world, right now everything is essentially built around our infrastructure and some things are hardcoded which would be useless, confusing, or potentially just a pain in the ass to deal with for most people. So thatāll be something on the horizon, Iām already working out the plans on how we can approach it.
Addressing your other stuff, yes, a lot on the site is now outdated, so we have things to fix, but itās time to move away from Discord anyway, as other people have pointed out, it really kept people from socializing on either MSN or AIM.
Alright, awesome! Glad I was wrong.
Itās been an alias Iāve been using for a while, which is just dfu. It was what I originally registered with (not sure if you can check any old DB or if you kept backups that far backwards to begin with for PII reasons .. but if you do, you have my express permission to make sure that shitās straight with me, which it should be if you cross-ref the email of dfu on Escargot to dfuser on the username@escargot.chat system)
Of course, I was like. Fourteen, so I didnāt think of talking to the big man and just kept being angry at yāall. Now I realize itās kinda stupid and like.. working with people is better. This is what happens when youāre 21-ish and not acting like a kid anymore.
Iām a shill, so.. there are a few options away from Discord. Matrix is one, IRC is another if people want to rock with old more than new (KiwiIRC is good for web UI, spam is potential but IRC has.. a LOT of ways to deal with that). I donāt like Discord all that much either, so I do not have much of a choice for straying away other than Matrix or Signal, and Signal doesnāt have support for large groups like that!! 
I do wholly appreciate the attempts to try and get the on-service activity up more!! There should be just One alternative commune. Just the one. Just not Discord. Because Discord really sucks.
Aw
Alright, cool. I think those donation tiers could be severely slimmed down so that people are more incentivized to donate, examples being the username restrictions I mope about a lot. My previous gripe is that it promotes OGUsers-isms with flipping usernames, but uh.. now that I have more nuance instead of blind confusion, maybe Iām just concerned that it isnāt fair to price it that way.
Let me know how this moves along!! Chat me up on here or somethinā, I leave notifications all the way on.
I was a beta member on discord server, i thought something i did was wrong, i thought i was banned. it doesnāt matter, but i do have a question. do you have any alternatives that youāre currently planning to make a server without discord?
And whatād happen to the all projects, like AOL, SKYPE, And progress with WebEscargot 2.0, after the whole fiasco? iām quite concerned over the future of this communityā¦ 
Edit: Sorry for the Late Reply, i know itās night but just now i found out about the fiascoā¦ Forgive meā¦ 
I guess itās time i ask for a username change lol
I feel like most of these will fold into being announced in Forums with donator-specific boards (I donāt know how those forums are built, so ā¦ integrations ahoy!)
Tony can provide a more nuanced response on that, this is just my theory
Our alternative will be the forums.
Iām not sure what you mean what happened to them, they still exist. WebEscargot key generation will be appearing in your account area soon, that is account.escargot.chat
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Let me clarify, By them i meant by Animadoria and/or other devs that they have to deal with the whole fiasco, what would happen to them, would they be on the website, notifying us every once in a while about stuff?
The projects and plans, what would happen to those, would you put those in the forums as separate topics, since you said thatād be in forums?
And will you (or others) update the situation with the projects plans, as you would notify us the news about the projects (Like webEscargot, AOL, Napster with Nina), plans (Like revivng Skype in future) and critical situations that youād advise us to donate in case of emergencies with cost of hosting servers and website as well (just in case), at the news section, in the website?
I have many questions to ask in my mind right now. But for now, those are the questions that are important to me, of course.
And sorry for my Annoying questions in advanceā¦
Edit: And what about the donation sections, just like with alpha, beta and gamma members you made at the discord servers, whatād we get in advance, a forum specifically for donators?
Itās genuinely sad how the OIC is starting to be infested with actual fucked up pedophiles. This isnāt even the first time Iāve heard of an incident involving such illegal material.
I have my own suspicions as to who the moderator might be, as their behavior written in the blog reminds me of someone Iāve heard of in the past. For my own safety and because Iām most likely to be incorrect, I will not say who. (edit: and it ended up not being who I was thinking about)
There used to be only one community, the MessengerGeek community, but it was split into the Escargot/NINA community around 2020.
I know, I was there for it. Escargot/NINA and MessengerGeek cooperating with each other probably wouldnāt hurt. Handling toxic children should be easy as long as thereās a round-clock of moderators on it (which should be MessengerGeek + NINAās team, prospective at least and maybe itās better if thereās dedicated forums and then dedicated IM moderation)
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Thatās not a bad idea at all. Itād be nice.
the only reason the community split up was because messengergeek had a toxicity/drama issue circa 2019-2020, but that was a long time ago and most of the people involved are long gone.
regardless, iām pretty sure escargot is just gonna use their own forums, which have been in a read-only state for years but are in the process of reopening.
There are the NINA forums (which use the same framework as the Escargot forums, which appears to have no information at all), but I think itās necessary for actual forum software to be installed instead of fully banking on a first-party solution. Software is really annoying and itās very much not worth it when moderation youāre basically making the ASP.net forums demo with what looks like some Bootstrap-inspired UX. Nothing wrong with Bootstrap, just uh.. eh. It gets boring after a few looks at the same set of buttons and controls.
However! However. I do think what Wink uses, Discourse, is pretty damn snazzy. Thereās also Xenforo, bla bla, bla.. licensing, bla.. Discourseās the best as far as I can tell. No licensing bullshit required if you can self-host it. That would also leave all data in control of NINA/Escargot if they really donāt want to mix everyone together. Thatās on my end of agreeing with some separation based on previous issues.
Anything to do with old Roblox is suffering from the same problems of nazi/fascist infestation + a lot of toxicity issues stemming from bad influences on growing teenagers. The internet is becoming less and less safe for those who are just looking to have fun. Shit, chatrooms for kids are a terrible idea now, because of how many people want to hurt those children.
People are just the worst, IM is the last line of defense on kids wanting to be kids. What old IMs were doing were fuckinā awesome, now modern shit like Discord is riddled with sexual predators. I would hate for that to inefct anything close to Escargot/NINA. Presentation of this is also important, as Chivanet exists. Chivanet is more of a ācomfortable later teens to young adultsā market.
