The mystery of DT's new owner - SOLVED

photekq · 20 Jan 2024, 16:16

I do apologize in advance if this comes off a bit personal and/or wanky. While I haven't been active here for a fair while, this forum and its members were an important part of my teenage years, and I still hold them uncomfortably close to my heart. And when something is close to my heart, I sometimes can't help but to wax lyrical. I do also want to explain my actions as well as I can.

When it was first announced that Deskthority would be sold to a new owner, I wasn't concerned about whether or not the website would stay live - clearly, the new owner would have no reason to take it down or fail to upkeep it. Sure, there were a few judders here and there under Onecommerce's ownership, and our new owners rarely showed their faces. But I worried not.

That changed recently when Onecommerce announced their desire to sell the website again. To be honest, when Deskthority was first sold I already considered it to be a near valueless asset to any profit-minded company; unlike Geekhack, which was wisely and considerately bought by Massdrop, Deskthority has never been friendly towards companies or profit-driven endeavours. But regardless of my assessment - the website was still a little active at that point, and had its merits (notably: it's history and it's wiki). Fast foward to now though, I'm far more steadfast in my assessment. This forum is dead, kaput. This forum that once fostered enthusiasm and fanaticism is a husk of what it once was. There are still some shining hubs out there for keyboards, but Deskthority is no longer one of them.

I fear that Onecommerce will not be able to find a buyer willing to pay a satisfactory amount, and that they'll grow tired of paying to prop up a wasting asset. I fear that this forum and all of the fond memories it contains will go offline forever in the near future. My fears have definitely been exacerbated by the intermittent downtime and nginx errors recently too.

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To quell my worries, I've cloned Deskthority. Not raw, unsearchable HTML pages like Wayback Machine or HTTrack, but a full clone. All posts, images and files have been downloaded, and thread/post databases have been recreated. Search functions will be carried over, and you'll be able to browse the forum exactly the same as you do now.

If Deskthority happens to go offline in the future, you will be able to find the clone here (likely after a short delay): https://kbdarchive.org/

To see a similar live example, have a look at OTD Archive - a clone of OTD.kr, which was an incredibly impactful Korean keyboard forum that sadly no longer works (except for the homepage).

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As pathetic as it might sound, my life would probably be very different if it weren't for Deskthority. I still remember spending hours every day trawling through old posts, constantly discovering things I'd never seen before. I still remember seeing Sixty's photos of Cherry keyboards for the first time, sending me down a rabbit hole I still haven't climbed out of. I still remember talking to countless lovely people here through PMs, one or two of which are surprisingly still here today. That certainly helped with my loneliness at the time.

The same goes for Geekhack, the same goes for OTD and kbdmania. But only Deskthority feels threatened. If you're like me, if you have fond memories of this place, I hope this clone will help you to revisit them if things go to pot.

Thank you to webwit and sixty for creating this place. It was lovely.

webwit · 20 Jan 2024, 18:41

What happened to OTD? That inspired the Deskthority name.

photekq · 20 Jan 2024, 18:53

webwit wrote: ↑
20 Jan 2024, 18:41
What happened to OTD? That inspired the Deskthority name.

OTD became quieter and quieter over time, with a huge drop-off happening between 2013 and 2014. It still had sporadic posts as late as 2017, but at that point it was clearly no longer the busy, tight-knit community it once was. To put this in perspective, here's the number of posts on freeboard (the main forum section) by year for a few years - note that a daily thread was automatically made, so you can remove 365 posts for a human-made number:

2009 - 4114, 2010 - 9421, 2011 - 13082, 2012 - 8671, 2013 - 6981, 2014 - 2216, 2015 - 1009, 2016 - 813, 2017 - 773, 2018 - 532, 2019 - 511. Every year following was sub-500.

Past 2017, it's safe to classify it as a ghost town. Deader than dead. A friend of mine noticed at some point during 2021 (I think) that OTD's domain was coming up for its first renewal in years. I knew that the admin was long distanced, and I knew the state of the forum, so I started worrying. It turned out that he did renew the domain, but the site's backend has since broken and it has remained unfixed so it's completely unusable. Good job I was paranoid.

Muirium · 20 Jan 2024, 19:10

photekq wrote: ↑
20 Jan 2024, 18:53
Good job I was paranoid.

Indeed.

I bookmarked your archive. It's more a matter of when, not if, I think.

webwit · 20 Jan 2024, 23:16

photekq wrote: ↑
20 Jan 2024, 18:53

webwit wrote: ↑
20 Jan 2024, 18:41
What happened to OTD? That inspired the Deskthority name.
OTD became quieter and quieter over time, with a huge drop-off happening between 2013 and 2014. It still had sporadic posts as late as 2017, but at that point it was clearly no longer the busy, tight-knit community it once was. To put this in perspective, here's the number of posts on freeboard (the main forum section) by year for a few years - note that a daily thread was automatically made, so you can remove 365 posts for a human-made number:

2009 - 4114, 2010 - 9421, 2011 - 13082, 2012 - 8671, 2013 - 6981, 2014 - 2216, 2015 - 1009, 2016 - 813, 2017 - 773, 2018 - 532, 2019 - 511. Every year following was sub-500.

Past 2017, it's safe to classify it as a ghost town. Deader than dead. A friend of mine noticed at some point during 2021 (I think) that OTD's domain was coming up for its first renewal in years. I knew that the admin was long distanced, and I knew the state of the forum, so I started worrying. It turned out that he did renew the domain, but the site's backend has since broken and it has remained unfixed so it's completely unusable. Good job I was paranoid.

Very nice, trip down memory lane.
https://www.kbdarchive.org/otd_archive/ ... rch=webwit
https://www.kbdarchive.org/otd_archive/ ... arch=sixty
We got much of our inspiration from there, the scene pretty much originated in South Korea and Japan.

photekq · 20 Jan 2024, 23:57

webwit wrote: ↑
20 Jan 2024, 23:16
Very nice, trip down memory lane.

It's a trip I've taken too many times to count. I think I viewed you and sixty's posts more on OTD than I did here on DT

I can't recommend that site enough, even in this year. They did so many cool things, even putting aside their famed 356 series. And some of those blokes were awfully good photographers.

Go-Kart · 21 Jan 2024, 11:02

photekq wrote: ↑
20 Jan 2024, 16:16

If Deskthority happens to go offline in the future, you will be able to find the clone here (likely after a short delay): https://kbdarchive.org/

Thanks, dude.

ifohancroft · 22 Jan 2024, 23:02

photekq wrote: ↑
20 Jan 2024, 16:16
https://kbdarchive.org/

Sorry for butchering your post in the quote. I am using it mostly as a way to tag you.

Thanks for making the clone! How would it work in terms of post association with new accounts? I mean is it just an archive or can we register? In terms of registration, if we register as the same name we had on Deskthority, would our old posts be associated back to our accounts?

Muirium · 23 Jan 2024, 00:13

kbdarchive wrote:This website is a clone of OTD.KR - it only exists to maintain the historical information that OTD once housed, and to act as a monument to this incredible, passionate community. Nothing presented here is the original work of kbdarchive.org

Given this banner on every page there, I think a read-only clone—“a monument”—is the idea. Not a new forum to continue DT.

photekq · 23 Jan 2024, 09:15

ifohancroft wrote: ↑
22 Jan 2024, 23:02
Sorry for butchering your post in the quote. I am using it mostly as a way to tag you.

Thanks for making the clone! How would it work in terms of post association with new accounts? I mean is it just an archive or can we register? In terms of registration, if we register as the same name we had on Deskthority, would our old posts be associated back to our accounts?

Muirium hit the nail on the head. The idea is to extend access to valuable information and precious memories, nothing more.

Muirium · 26 Jan 2024, 13:36

Perhaps your clone could help me with a query. I'd like a list of all DT posts with the text {size=1} in them (but with square brackets instead of curly braces), to track down the remaining edit-spam still festering in the forum. The search function here insists on searching for the word "size" instead, which is far too common.

Hey, maybe I’m just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic, but damn it if their disarray doesn't still annoy me.

photekq · 26 Jan 2024, 14:13

Muirium wrote: ↑
26 Jan 2024, 13:36
Perhaps your clone could help me with a query. I'd like a list of all DT posts with the text {size=1} in them (but with square brackets instead of curly braces), to track down the remaining edit-spam still festering in the forum. The search function here insists on searching for the word "size" instead, which is far too common.

Hey, maybe I’m just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic, but damn it if their disarray doesn't still annoy me.

There are no posts with a text size between 1 and 49. {size=10} gets converted to <span style="font-size=10%, for example. So you must've caught them all.

Here is every post with a text size set to 50, using their post ID. These can be accessed with:

viewtopic.php?p=[postID]#p[postID]

Code: Select all

Muirium · 26 Jan 2024, 14:34

Thanks for that. How about this spam post, which I neutralised but otherwise left intact:

viewtopic.php?p=518381#p518381

Its id doesn't show up on your list, and DT's phpBB does indeed hide its hideous little size=1 text. Hit quote on it yourself, to see its contents.

I think the spammer is using a phpBB bug. If you try to post with size=0-49 you'll get an error and told to try a number that is in scope. But if you edit your post… tada! spamspamspamspam

I get that you're doing things from the other side: scraping the html/coderspeak as shown to the browser. So I don't know how precisely to get the posts I’m looking for. I do expect they are faithfully lurking in your copy, however.

photekq · 26 Jan 2024, 14:39

Scratch that last post; I made a mistake.

Here's every post with size=1:

Code: Select all

and also,
2-10

Code: Select all

11-20

Code: Select all

Muirium · 26 Jan 2024, 14:40

That's more like it! Thanks! I'll zap the bastards.

Not all of them are malicious. I like this one, for example. Well hidden, Mr. Beardsmore!

A lot of the size=1 list seem to be false positives, concentrated on 7bit's threads. I’m not finding any actual size= anything in those posts. Nor this one, nor this.

Then there are the occasional open mysteries like this:

viewtopic.php?p=459213#459213

Muirium · 26 Jan 2024, 15:04

Spoiler:

FYI, when deleting spam, I habitually copy the payload url and search DT for other instances of it. Rarely get any positives. This search, though, takes the biscuit for both a horrible domain name and DT's deeply braindead search function.*

The original url has a .info suffix, but if you don't remove that, DT will return every instance of the word "info" ever posted on the forum.

*More silliness: the zero result it now reports—now that there is one: this very post

—is different from what I was getting when I posted it:

Information
The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: editedstupidword.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 2 characters and must not contain more than 20 characters excluding wildcards.

Gotta love a Heisenbug.

Meanwhile, 7bit liked using a sly bit of size=1 too for some reason…

Spoiler:

I do miss him.

Anyway, that's pretty much that. Everything I’m finding now is either 7bit or some other guy messing around. Thanks for the help clearing out the final dirty dozen, Photekq!