Blazing comments

It's a disappointment to Blaze, evidently, that the Community failed to collapse after the hacking, but he had hopes for Shinou.com to surpass PC in some time due to either a lack of funding for the server or lack of general linterest. His aspirations have gone so far as to create a blog — one that now has the Community Staff kicking up a fuss.

Blaze's blog has contributions from many members of Shinou.com, including BGTFamily, who owns the back end site Total Pokémon. In his post 'Guest Blogger', he allows BGT to post what seems to be evidence of Shinou.com steadily overtaking the Pokémon Community and provides numbers courtesy of 'some fellow fans', while the numbers prove, on further examination, to be completely fabricated. BGT rates the Pokémon Community to have 3,344 members against Shinou's 2,060 at the time of writing, but a quick look at the PC boards will tell you that the number of registered users — not active users, since the article doesn't say that — is currently 20,839, the day after publication of the article.

Another piece of information contributed by kind Blaze is a review of Paul's PokéJungle project. Upon hearing that the domain is 'Spinarak', he jumps and yells that Spinarak is a trademark of Nintendo, which it is, and warns against removal of the domain. It may seem like a shrewd warning, but wasn't it Blaze himself who took the domain Shinou.com, another trademark of Nintendo? Any sane person will know that copyright laws don't extend to the use of these domain names for fan sites, which Shinou.com and the Spinarak domain are.

Then there's a quip below that article: 'While we were at this once amazing forum, we were in talks with Kwesi (the humble and quite rad owner of PC) to co-pay for a server for PC/TotalPokemon.com. Approximently about Five Days after Kwesi paid for the Server in full, did we pull out of the agreement due to the arrogant PC Staff who did not like the idea of us having control . . . [and] decided that they rather pay for the Server, then have us have anything to do with it. Apparently they didn't keep their word, because about a few days ago PC once again has ads featured all over the forum.' They broke the word when the agreement was broken, so they had no choice. This post is effectively bull.

Most unfortunately, I'm not the first to report on the sleight of hand and otherwise plain and simple tosh that this blog offers. Remember FandomObserver? While he refuses to reveal his identity (and there have been calls for him to do so), he's become a good contemporary of mine. While he maintains the idea of just reviewing the fandom as a whole, he's gone in and criticised Blaze, something I should have done long ago, closing the first part of his latest review with a title, 'Misguided Webmaster With A Big Ego'. All I can say in addition to that specifically is that Joe's eating his heart out right now.

So what is Blaze? Does he have an ego? Yes. Does he remain true to his contemporaries, especially Erica, whom he said would be the only one out of PC's staff administrators to get any staff holding? No. Does BGT? No, he relied on ridiculously inaccurate statistics (Alexa, which is generated by users using the site's toolbar) after three months of quibbling with the rest of the PC staff.

It's a good thing Nicola's not including Total Pokémon in her collaborative 'Autumn Always'.

Not gone

...and I bite my tongue at my thoughts since the last post.

Not only has Blaze initiated Shinou.com, touting it as a replacement for PC when it goes down due to intrusion or lack of funding, but PC was hacked yesterday. Last night I learned that someone had been using Steve's account on the sly, but now was when it was really time they did stuff: When the smoke cleared, all of the super moderators had been removed, all super mods except Jake had been removed, and the entire population fell to 225. That number remains at the bottom of the main index but is soon to be fixed. During that time, I admit I had no desire to return to the forums if they came back, seeing as it was, to me at that time, a summation of a horrible server and faulty practical security working as one. Of course, now that I realise that they could just go back and grab a backup of the forums as they had done two weeks ago, although it'd cost them records after 4 September, I now see myself as an idiot.

The first guess was that Blaze and BGTFamily, the owners of Total Pokémon, were connected to it as they had been hounded out of the Community and Shinou.com was opening right around the time of the hack. Yet both contended that they weren't, although Blaze foresaw the hack after a chat response warning him against a friend of the sender coming to take down the site and PPN, which is slated for removal from the fold soon anyway. The decision to remove PPN, though, and leave just SIVPH, was the genesis for Blaze's guess that Shinou would survive and eclipse PC once funds falter.

There was me thinking that PC would have to obtain yet another database, as they did in September 2003 when their old database failed. Instead, Kwesi insisted on moving house — the URL became www.theud.com/pokecommunity (the old URL will redirect — in fact, the URL was redirected the night of the hacking, right when the boards were ready to go public again; that may have been a factor) and mods had to fix up glitches that resulted from the move (which were generally confined to broken images). Of course, a backup of the boards from 4 September had to be put in — the boards were down completely for five days at that rate, so little difference was made.

Oh, and at time of writing Shinou.com was still closed. I'll say that by tomorrow night they should be open. I guess having bilingual forums and a hassled agenda went quite a way.