ROMhacking.net shuts down after 20 years; database has been moved to the Internet Archive

Hi there.
I'm a bit hesitant about allowing or not linking to the website archives.
For the time being, and while we discuss about it among the mods, I'd like to ask you to refrain from posting any link to said archive.
If we decide to allow it, I'll restore the comments containing said links I've removed.
Thank you for your understanding.
Final Edit :
After carefully considering both sides arguments, and talking about it with LM admins and the mod team, we decided to keep the direct links removed.
LM allows meta-discussions around piracy, but not linking to possible pirated content. As we do not have the means and resources to check the whole 12Go dump to make sure no there is no copyrighted content in one of those Rom Hacks. More information here.
Rom Hacking is a gray area which is, depending on your location and/or interpretation of your local law, allowed or not. LW is under EU Jurisdiction (see that part of the TOS), and has to abide with rather restrictive law on that matter. There is unfortunately no broad "fair use" exception in that jurisdiction, only specific exceptions listed here. None of them seem to be applicable to Rom Hacks, which mean that they are to be considered potentially illegal under LW jurisdiction.
- If it's a romhacking site, it wont have the actual ROMs, just the patches. It never would have survived 20 years if it had been hosting ROMs.
  
  You got a good point here. I'll take that into consideration.
- From what I see in the archive link I posted, it only contains patches, not playable games, neither original nor patched. You need a copy of the game already to make any use of it.
  
  I'll take a look tomorrow. I'm UTC+2 (I just can't sleep right now 😅), so I'm not yet in the required state of mind to go and check all of that.
  
  That's correct. The entire archive is only about 12GB; it couldn't possibly contain the full games.
- Saying you're cross usually means angry.
  
  Oh, my bad 😂
  I meant that I was hesitant.
  As you can see, English is not my main language.

Such a shame...
Here's Gideon Zhi's response and a little explanation, from his side anyway, of what has actually happened.
If you're not familiar, he runs Aeon Genesis, one of the longest, if not the longest, running translation groups.
- Yeesh, I've never used the website but that NightCrawler person seems like they have some serious control problems. The fact that the whole community was willing to chip in/pay for it and take it over and the admin still refused to cooperate is pretty shitty. At least it looks like someone managed to convince the admin to let them host and takeover the site's wiki.
  
  This is oddly common in ROM hacking/mod scenes. There's been no shortage of drama in the Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics communities, too.
  At the very least I wish people would consider the bus test once a site/project gets to a certain critical mass. Insane to me that a site with this kind of profile never had coverage for that scenario this entire time.
- after some further research, it became apparent that Discord staff could save a significant amount of money by changing S3 providers. The new bucket was set up, but when the time came to make the change NC refused to do it, even though he was not the one footing the bill.
  There's a conspicuous absence of explaining why they wouldn't do it. What were their actual concerns? Did they not voice them or are they just being withheld?
  NC refused to join the Discord to talk about solutions in real-time.
  Why was this a requirement?
  Did we vent in private? Sure.
  And what did you say?
  Did we dox or threaten? Fucking hell, no! And frankly I'm LIVID at even the suggestion that we did.
  Well something clearly happened if his family was brought into it, so if you're going to skimp on the details, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to believe that.
  The whole thing just comes back to the larger issue with discord: the record vanishes.
- I really hope that tcrf doesn't take over. I STILL can't contribute to that website because it requires you to sign up for Discord and agree to Discord's ToS just to paste some stupid code into their bot.
  
  Wait are you talking cutting room? I had no idea they did that. Very weird for a site that's just copying Wikipedia.

One of the last Web 1.0 bastions in gaming. Really hate to see this, especially when Discord is around the peak of its popularity right now. Here's hoping a more future-proof alternative than that arises.

I thought it was NOT shutting down and is instead turning into 100% a news site only?
- Functionally speaking the distinction is negligible. Users won't be able to download patches from the site, and new patch submissions won't be accepted.
  
  People also used RHDN as a news source to find out about new hacks and translation releases, and it was the best resource for doing that. And it sounds like it still will be going forward, so... I disagree with you on that.
- Oh, like abandonia? Their last six articles, all newsvertainment for gambling shit, are years old, but their database is still there last I checked.
- Yeah, WTF?

Wtf no

Nooooo!!!!!

NOOOOOOOOOOOO

A lot of internet gardens are dying these days…

Hail Hydra

Jesus Christ.