what happened to actionscript.org

I know many as3 forums started to dry up but actionscript.org still had daily posts… untill recently I noticed its totally overrun with spam and noone removes it. I guess they gave up.

sorry thecanadian, I found a new name brand watch supplier

Oh wow. I haven’t been there in a while, and yeah. It’s pretty spammy. I started to delete some of the spam in the AS3 forum, but after a couple of pages I realized it wasn’t stopping. And I don’t have a way to remove/ban users so its pretty useless.

I didn’t get nor see any messages about the state of affairs. I guess it was just abandoned and forgotten.

Looks like another forum I tried to join just recently (the Dremel message boards, to see what’s up with my Multi Max).

Totally overloaded with spam that just won’t stop, and the company itself doesn’t seem to care.

Keeping spammers at bay is a time-consuming job. Once spammers find that their posts stay up for a while, they pretty much signal to other spammers to post there as well.

Over the years I’ve become somewhat sympathetic to them. In a sense, the only rules they’re breaking are in a site’s Terms of Service, or similar, but ToSes can only really restrict you from a particular site. I assume they’re doing it because they’re being paid, even if it’s a minuscule amount. It’s legal, and not clearly morally wrong to spam a site, since these same people are doing their best to achieve a high income, even if that income is potentially less than the minimum wage in the place where spammers live.

It’s kind of like the classic Mechanical Turk or oDesk debate about wages, ethics, etc. People will do what’s profitable, and I guess spamming counts as profitable somehow. And it’s hard to be angry, since terms of service are just a reflection of your rights as a server operator. You can ban any traffic you want, and spammers are a great target because they don’t contribute anything of value except to search engines, or advertisers, or whomever. Certainly not the community. But there’s no real drawback to them spamming communities they don’t care about, since they’ll likely never even attempt to earnestly join any particular community which they decide (or are instructed to) spam.

Is there anything in our ToS about banning sympathizers?

@krilnon
I’m not sure I have the right impression, since I haven’t had to deal with Kirupan spammers, but my impression is that some of them have been uniquely human and original, sometimes even dropping a personal line, perhaps because the unusual strategy from kirupa moderators to challenge them?

I guess after the 100000ths spam across the world wide web, and 3 dollar in salary, the true values in the kirupa forum made their heart soft

Spam free means true quality, because it does require effort and represents a value, but I have to say, seeing that there is a human behind the spammer was an eye-opening experience - and sad.

I have not posted there or here for years, but from time to time I went there and snooped around for old times sake.

Jesse, sold the site over 2 years ago, many moderators quickly exited.

It quickly turned into a dump in the hands of the new owners/spammers. First they proliferated it with ads, many of which that take over and are intrusive or even out right questionable. Ads such as multiple video ads per page, link ads attached to everything, basically ads anywhere and everywhere. Then they opened the flood gates to spammers and just let them have their way. Earlier this year (2015) anyone whom was left (mostly in the AS3 forum) gave up even posting, now it is simply a spammer haven and complete dump moving forward.

Sadly some of the best Actionscript discussions/knowledge reside on that forum (no offense k-ville), and soon all of that will probably be lost at the rate its going. So long to my 5000+ posts. Just with in the last week I stopped by over there to check it and the forums were offline for “needed maintenance”, which must mean making it more spammer friendly.

The new owner seems to care less and seems happy with the place, they turned the place into a complete $#!T hole. The new owner in fact seems to be a professional spammer themselves from the looks of it.

I miss Flash, actionscript.org and the old K-ville, those were some good times. Its amazing as well as you take a trip down memory lane how many peoples sites, blogs, internet presences are no longer even in existence and expired completely. Not your average Flashers but stalwarts with in the industry. Actionscript.org seems to be heading that way just as fast. Thanks to the @$# faces whom bought it.

I digress.

With Flash on its way out and AS.org still high in search engine rankings, it seems like a likely buy for someone just looking to cash in.

It was a good forum, with a lot of great, smart and considerate contributors. The great Barn freakout of [insert year here; I can’t remember it] was a bit of a mess, but something that got people thinking if nothing else. I’m happy to have been a part of it, and all of the other flash communities over the years, (were-here, ultrashock, flashkit, newgrounds, as.org, kirupa, etc.). Its not quite the same anymore.

Barn, I think that was 2005.

Yeah, those were the days, nice list of memories, here are a few more: shavedplatypus, sephiroth, gotoandlearn, flashforum de, ozzu. There was another really good obscure one like SP, but I can’t think of it anymore, I may have to fire up an external hard drive for the name.

…many of those are also now spam dumps.

I have a hard drive that should probably be in a museum somewhere, a who’s who of Flash, with extensive research, materials, files etc… covering a decade and more from around the world. I am just amazed at the regurgitation into HTML5 of things done 10+ years ago in Flash and people are wetting there pants all over again over it, rather comical, sad, confounding all at once. What’s old is new again.

oh yeah! I don’t think I remember shavedplatypus, though. The others I recognize.

lol I remember when the Java guys were saying that about us (Flash) too haha. But thats prevalent just about everywhere.

Haha, that’s true the Java community was claiming the same …

… no new thing under the sun. – Ecclesiastes 1:9

dqs - was the one I was thinking of but could not remember above. That and SP had some top quality content. How about layer51, after looking at my hard drive for dqs, I could list tons of sites/forums from around the globe from tons of countries. Its also no joke concerning the museum quality flash archive resource, about 200 gigs of content, info, sources, most of which is no where to be found online today. I was a flash resource pack rat it seems, always feeling I needed to archive in case it disappears. Sadly most of it did online, as well as the need for it. I don’t think there is an effect or result that I either recreated or even more so have source of others whom did.

Yikes, quite an inspiring and depressing trip down memory lane after a quick look on that HD. I may have to set aside some time to dig deeper and reminisce, maybe shed a tear or two.

Holy cow. Pack rat; no kidding!

Layer51 was another big one for me. I still have a few things online under that name, like, uh…: http://senocular.com/pub/layer51/freetransform.swf

Oooo even have a couple of things from were-here, including a tennis battle with the final being:
http://senocular.com/pub/werehere/ASTennis/ASlines9.html
(complete with rendering bug still visible!)

I have a bunch of old stuff I wanted to go through and sort out myself, but I never found time. Or never seem to want to if I have the time heh. I have nowhere near that much though, and most of it is small, little things I was experimenting with (like the transform stuff linked above). I don’t remember keeping too much from other people, though.

BillyBussey, 2advanced, k10k, yugop, turtleshell, balthaser, akimbo, hillmancurtis, juxt interactive, shockwave.com, habbohotel, dubit.co.uk, once-upon-a-forest, bit-101, erik natzke, and soo many more that I should add to this list of Flash content that is mostly lost forever.

Oddly enough, it seems they think they have it under control….

Spam attack stopped

… or seemingly they have given up again since then?

Appears to me like maybe a DDoS attack got their attention and got them to take some measures at that time, but I doubt (and it doesn’t seem to be the case) that they’re going to try to do a better job of maintaining things.

Hey, I remember Barn on this forum! I also seem to remember being annoyed by him several times, though I was ~15 back then and not old and wise like I am now

I was just digging around in the post about Barn quitting as.org. It’s funny, in a sad/ridiculous way, reading the old Internet forum fights about nothing.

Senocular, by the way, do you still have MOD privileges over there? Whatever happened to CyanBlue do you know?

Seems like they are either still under attack or trying to resolve the spam, or maybe neither just adding more ads.

3/31/14 - We are performing some essential maintenance. Please come back soon!

The question is however, after being run off by spammers is there anyone to come back once resolved?

If you look at the person whom posted that announcement about the DDoS:

Rafael-MasMedia - Administrator
Home page - http://theforum.com/our-communities/

They seem to own many unrelated and somewhat diverse forums, sadly AS.org seems to be the only one that was left to become a waste land (at least presently).

I do, but I think I stopped being very involved myself before a lot of this happened. I’m not sure what happened to CB, but I assumed he lasted longer than I did. With an increased workload I’ve pretty much reduced myself to just kirupa (and even then often sporadically). I could do some digging around but not much can be done while they’re under maintenance.