Which one are you?

[Zephlar]

At least nobody's passed me in post count.

Yeah wtf how the hell do you have so many? You must have been going hard back in s.net's prime.

[Spectere]

Bobbias has been one of my loyal minions from the very beginning. I don't remember exactly when he joined, but he's been here for a long ass time. <3

But don't worry, you're still the first and only person to recognize me in public.

[Bobbias]

and only person to recognize me in public.

rip spectere's ego.

And yeah, when this place was more active I practically lived here. I don't remember much about when I first joined (going back to 2007 is still cool, but there was a lot of stuff lost when the old forum backup failed or whatever happened), but I vaguely remember seeing a link on sperctere's profile on arch0wl and deciding to check the place out. I quickly ended up spending more time here than on arch0wl, and when arch0wl imploded I made spectere.net my internet home. It's still one of my most visited sites, even if it's far less active than it was at it's peak.

[Spectere]

a0.com kinda became a bit of a dumpster fire toward the end when everyone got it in their heads that it was the second coming of 4chan. Ye gods, that was annoying to moderate. ODI is pretty much the perfect example of what a0.com would have become if the mentally stable admins/mods weren't there, so I don't think the effort and stress was at all in vain.

The thing that mostly complicated moving over forum backups was that this site was originally phpBB 2 (s.net 1.0 definitely was, and 2.0 might have been--I don't remember). At the time there was some sort of oddity with migrating the phpBB forum backup to SMF 1.0, which is why that didn't get done. a0.com was migrated to SMF much later and everything went fairly smoothly.

I kinda gave a bullshit reason for not migrating s.net 3.0 over to 4.0 (which is this revision!). In all honesty, there was a lot of drama in my personal life going on at the time with one particular person that I wanted to wipe out altogether. Probably not the best way of doing it, in hindsight, but it made a clean break at the very least (it didn't help that I was kind of an emotional wreck at the time...plenty of regrets from those years). But yeah, that's the Real Reason™ s.net 4.0 persisted through 3-4 web host migrations while 3.0 just sort of died. I might still have the backup for s.net 3.0 (and prior); not sure, really. Either way, I don't particularly care to look at it.

[Zephlar]

Bobbias the OG up in this bitch damn. I don't think I was around much then.

I really dropped off the internet a lot between 2006-2010. That was was my "irresponsible" phase when I started partying hard and doing stupid stuff. Glad those days are over but don't necessarily regret them either.

I think I was Forsaker on your old PHPBB forum, or maybe that was just ao. I do remember the transition to SMF pretty vividly. I was photoshop crazy at the time I remember trying to do logos and such for you. Speaking of Photoshop crazy I'm still wondering wtf happened to sqthreer. His photoshop skills were off the chain I really admired his work. I legit wonder if he died because his website, YT page, Soundcloud, flickr, all just randomly stopped getting updated content and that YEARS ago. He's been a ghost ever since.

I don't really remember and major drama with you Spectere, though I'm sure you weren't like super open about it either. Was it a bad breakup?

[Spectere]

Yeah, you were Forsaker back in those days. I don't think you switched to Zephlar until s.net 3.0 or 4.0. It's been a while.

And yeah, I Sq3r/Sqthreer was a pretty rad dude. Wish I knew what happened to him. Maybe he's just going by a different name now or something?

There was definitely behind the scenes drama, I was just even worse of a bottler then than I am now. It wasn't a breakup with an SO or anything like that, but more like me having to drop an incredibly toxic "friend" who decided that it would be a good idea to start talking shit about me behind my back on an Internet forum, then not even having the courtesy to be honest about anything when I called her out on it.

Thennnnn there was that long stretch of time where I didn't post here at all and only responded to when people reported spam bots (by just deleting the posts and moving on).

Yeah, my 20s (particular my mid- to late-20s) didn't go so well. Still dealing with the fallout from it in some ways but at least I'm generally happier now.

[Zephlar]

Damn that's messed up dude was trashin you. I just can't imagine what someone would even have to talk shit on you about you were probably one of the most sane and reasonable people ever especially back then.

Guessing you guys must have been close.

[Spectere]

Being reasonable doesn't help when someone else is unreasonable (not to mention unbelievably narcissistic), unfortunately.

Basically, what happened is that she picked an argument with one of my other IRL friends (this actually happened on s.net 3.0, among other things), who first attempted to diffuse the argument but started trolling her when she persisted. I didn't pick sides--I played Switzerland and locked the thread. The next day I get a message telling me to check out another forum where I find her trash talking me behind my back but in a public place. I call her out and mention that if she had a problem with it she should have called me, she makes up some bullshit excuses (literally said "I posted it here so that you would see it" on a forum that I hadn't been to in over a year), and I tell her I never want to hear from her ever again.

That's when she tried to call me. Too fucking late, asshole.

Later on I find out from another friend that after all that happened she started trying to turn him against me. Considering I've been friends with him since kindergarten (and we're still very close buds despite living 300 miles apart) he wasn't having any of it.

As for her, I wouldn't say that we were super close, but all of this happened during a time where a lot of my friends were moving out of the area for various reasons while I was going to college. It was one of those situations where I could tell that she was trouble based on how she talked about other people, but I guess I just sort of deluded myself into looking past it. Looking back, telling her to fuck off was one of the best choices as far as my social life is concerned. To date, I think she's the only person who I actively unfriended. I've drifted apart from some former friends in the past (as we all have, I'm sure), but I've never had an explosive split before or since.

[Bobbias]

Damn man, I had no idea that was going on. That sucks. I do appreciate that you kept the site up and removed the spam though. I really do consider this one of the most important websites in my life. Ive been through some hard times but this was somewhere I could go and chat and not worry about that shit. I honestly cant believe its still up, but Im honestly really greatful. Makes me feel a little less lonely on the internet.

[Spectere]

Yeah, I've been trying to open up a bit more over the years. Kinda wish I would have learned earlier that bottling is incredibly unhealthy, but oh well.

And hey, I'm glad this site helped you. I don't have any plans to ever shut this place down. The only way it's going down is if I can't pay the bill for whatever reason.

[Zephlar]

It's a balancing act dude. Catch 22 either way if you're not careful. Too open and honest and you may say something you'll regret. Honestly without compassion is cruelty so they say. Don't say anything and you may regret saying nothing. It's a complicated thing.

I honestly wish I could bottle things up like that. I wear my heart on my sleeve and am incredibly reactionary without thinking. I've gotten better as I've matured but being extremely reactionary often means you say shit you can't take back. I've hurt some really close people because of that and always wished in retrospect I could have just shut the fuck up and let things go but I have this borderline aggressive need to "solve" things immediately.

Sounds like you've gotten more balanced as you've aged anyway. Still yeah crazy nobody would have guessed that about you.

Hey you never know this site may blow up some day who knows! We're gonna be like 50 posting in here before we know it lol.

[Spectere]

Yep. I've been taking it kind of slowly and building out from there. My anxiety kind of helps keep me in check in a lot of ways.

As far as bottling, like you said, it's a balancing act. On one hand, you don't want to lash out at people over the slightest whim, but on the other hand you don't want to lock everything up. For the longest time I'd bottle up mental pain but nowadays? Fuck it. You hurt me, I'm not going to sit by and take it. I've told off more people (who, frankly, deserved it) in my late 20s than I did throughout the rest of my life.

I do make sure not to completely fly off the handle, though. One of the things that my mom's known for is 1) her death glare and 2) laser accurate aggression. It seems like I picked up a bit of that from her.

And yeah, I'll bet you've gotten more balanced as well. It's kind of hard to measure unless you've had something push you hard in one direction. That Nielsen job that I had in Maryland was kind of traumatic in a lot of ways. Telling my ex-supervisor off was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done. I don't say this about many people, but that's one motherfucker who deserves to get the shit kicked out of him. One of the first things I experienced from him was him being abusing toward his wife over the phone, so it's no surprise that literally nobody that worked under him liked him.

Eh, if it blows up I'll rebuild it. s.net 4.0 has been through...three different web hosts, I think? I want to say it's been on 1&1, HostGator, and Linode (which is its current home). Even if I can't salvage the data for whatever reason (I pay Linode to do managed backups so even that's highly unlikely) I'll make sure that the forum comes back up in some capacity.

[Jupi]

I got der Mediator.  :V

https://www.16personalities.com/infp-personality